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Some 70 years before the current frenzy of record-breaking fundraising by modern AI giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the Rockefeller Foundation made what may have been the first investment in the history of AI. With a $7,500 grant from the foundation in 1956, four eminent mathematicians organised the Dartmouth Workshop, where the term “artificial intelligence” was first coined.
One man at the Rockefeller Foundation offered a ray of hope: Warren Weaver, director of the Division of Natural Sciences, had already approved funding for several landmark projects of the time, including in genetics, molecular engineering and agriculture. Weaver had also written an analysis of Shannon’s work. “Weaver was a friend of Shannon's, which is why the application was addressed directly to him,” said Rudolf Seising, who specialises in the history of science and technology at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. But although Weaver found the proposal interesting, he felt it was focused on how the brain works, and that brain research sounded more like medicine than mathematics, according to Seising. “He therefore forwarded it to Robert S. Morison, the director of medical research at the foundation,” he added. Morison decided to award $7,500 to this biomathematics project, making the first AI investment in history. The term “artificial intelligence” was still not yet a fait accompli. In a joint article written with Shannon, McCarthy suggested referring to “Intelligent Machines”, but “Shannon felt the term was much too big,” Seising said. They eventually settled on “Automata Studies”, which McCarthy found less promising. “‘Artificial intelligence’ was a good term for raising money and to interest the public and policymakers. But it was not purely a marketing decision, as it also served to define a common vision; it was the starting point for a community of researchers on artificial intelligence,” said Hartmut Hirsch-Kreinsen, a sociologist who specialises in technology. That was the aim of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. The group of four – McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon and von Neumann – wanted to bring together mathematicians, philosophers and economists alike to work on the future of AI.
In June 1956, the team took up residence at Dartmouth College apartments for five weeks. The true significance of the research programme is debated to this day: was this really the founding moment of AI, or were the results disappointing overall? The conference itself yielded little of substance. Its organisers had hoped for an exchange of ideas that would in the near future enable them to demonstrate in concrete terms that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”, as McCarthy wrote. In reality, the various accounts of this historic conference show that most of the participants – the exact number of whom is not known – interacted with one another only very sporadically and were present for just a few days, sometimes simply to make use of the computers. But the Dartmouth workshop went down in history, and the 50th anniversary of AI was celebrated in 2006. And at least one breakthrough was unveiled at the conference: the “Logic Theorist”, considered to be the very first AI programme, was presented by its creators, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, to the Dartmouth assembly. Many of the workshop's participants went on to have brilliant careers, and several went on to win Turing Awards, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for AI. The conference even influenced the silver screen in the 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Director Stanley Kubrick consulted Minsky as he was developing his concept for the HAL 9000 – the hyper-rational, potentially deadly AI computer and centerpiece of the film's spaceship. This article has been translated from the original in French.