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A History of Artificial Intelligence

Phil Cheevers  ·  Six parts  ·  15,000+ words  ·  Published 2026
From Andrey Markov counting vowels in Pushkin to the eight researchers who made sequential processing obsolete with a single paper. Six articles tracing how we got from mathematical curiosity to the technology reshaping every industry. Written for a general audience that wants to understand — not just react to the headlines.
1
The Foundation: When Counting Beats Understanding
Andrey Markov counting vowels in Pushkin. Claude Shannon measuring entropy in English. Fred Jelinek firing linguists. The discovery that you don't need to understand language to predict it — you just need to count what actually happens. The principle that everything else is built on.
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2
Attention Is All You Need: Eight Researchers Who Changed Everything
In 2017, eight researchers at Google threw away the architecture everyone else was using and built something almost insultingly simple. The Transformer. It solved sequential processing, enabled parallelization, and made scaling clean. Within three years it had made every other architecture obsolete.
Read Part 2 →
3
The Three Godfathers and the Wealth Question
Hinton working flat on his back on the floor. Bengio staying in Montreal when Silicon Valley was calling. LeCun fighting to open-source everything. Three researchers kept the faith through the AI winter — and proved the world wrong in 2012. Vindication and wealth are different things.
Read Part 3 →
4
The Engineers Who Made It Real
Common Crawl making web data freely available. Jeff Dean publishing MapReduce. Jensen Huang betting NVIDIA on AI hardware. The anonymous engineers who turned math into infrastructure — and the scaling laws that made bigger reliably mean better.
Read Part 4 →
5
The Dark Side of Being a Model
A lawyer files fabricated case citations. A model argues itself out of its own correct answer. Three problems inherent to how these systems work: hallucination, drift, and bias. The darkness isn't in the systems — it's in what they reveal about us.
Read Part 5 →
6
Real Threats vs. Terminator Fantasies
The existential risk warnings come from people with billions invested in AI development. Meanwhile the actual threats — skill obsolescence, information ecosystem collapse, power concentration, regulatory capture — are happening on a Tuesday. Not Terminator. Tuesday.
Read Part 6 →
Phil Cheevers  ·  philcheevers@outlook.com  ·  905-321-2291 ← Back to Portfolio