Artificial Intelligence Gets Real for Investors: A Timeline

(Bloomberg) -- AI’s recent feats – beating a Go champion, navigating driverless cars, making money for investors – were many decades in the making.

1950: Alan Turing developed the Turing Test for recognizing machine intelligence

1956: John McCarthy coins “artificial intelligence” at Dartmouth College conference

1957: Invention of Perceptron, an algorithm that could be trained to classify images

1964: Computers understand natural language enough to solve algebra word problems

1968: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey features intelligent computer HAL 9000

1979: The Stanford Cart, an autonomous vehicle, navigates across a room full of obstacles

1982: James Simons starts quant investment firm Renaissance Technologies

1988: David Shaw founds D.E. Shaw, an early AI adopter among hedge funds

1990s: AI advances in machine learning, case-based reasoning, data mining, virtual reality

1997: IBM computer Deep Blue beats world chess champion Garry Kasparov

1990s: Web crawlers, other AI-based information programs, become Internet mainstays

1999: Sony AIBO, a robotic pet dog, understands 100 voice commands, learns and matures

2005: Sebastian Thrun’s Stanford team wins DARPA’s 132-mile driverless car race

2011: IBM Watson, a system capable of answering questions, wins quiz show Jeopardy

2012: Google’s self-driving car gets license in Nevada

2014: Man Group starts using machine learning algorithms to manage client money

2016: Alphabet’s DeepMind AlphaGo computer program beats Go champion

2017: AlphaGo Zero learns by playing against itself, beats AlphaGo by 100 games to 0

2017: Facebook switches entirely to neural networks for 4.5 billion translations a day

2017: First AI Powered Equity ETF driven by IBM’s Watson computer starts trading

2017: Two Sigma, a hedge fund that deploys machine learning, crosses $50 billion in assets under management

2040s: AI could be involved in 99 percent of investment management, according to Man Group.

Sources: Bloomberg, Man Group, Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, Winton

To contact the reporter on this story: Nishant Kumar in London at nkumar173@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Vincent Bielski, Josh Friedman

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