100 Years of Intelligence

1. 1926Cognitive Science

   Pavlov publishes Conditioned Reflexes

   Foundational work on associative learning that shaped 20th-century psychology and later reinforcement learning.

2. 1943AI

   McCulloch & Pitts neuron

   First mathematical model of a neuron — the ancestor of every artificial neural network.

3. 1948AI

   Wiener's Cybernetics

   Frames feedback and control as the shared language of brains and machines.

4. 1949Neuroscience

   Hebbian learning

   'Neurons that fire together, wire together' — the intuition behind synaptic plasticity and unsupervised learning.

1. 1956AI

   Dartmouth workshop

   The term 'Artificial Intelligence' is coined; the field is born.

2. 1957AI

   Rosenblatt's Perceptron

   First trainable neural network; sparked the first AI boom.

3. 1959Neuroscience

   Hubel & Wiesel map V1

   Discovery of orientation-selective cells — the architectural blueprint for CNNs 50 years later.

4. 1969AI

   Minsky & Papert publish Perceptrons

   Highlights limits of single-layer networks; triggers the first AI winter.

5. 1972Cognitive Science

   Tulving distinguishes episodic vs semantic memory

   Reshapes memory research and later informs retrieval-augmented AI systems.

1. 1982AI

   Hopfield networks

   Energy-based associative memory revives interest in neural computation.

2. 1986AI

   Backpropagation popularized

   Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams show multi-layer networks can learn — the seed of deep learning.

3. 1990Neurotech

   fMRI demonstrated

   Non-invasive brain imaging becomes the workhorse of cognitive neuroscience.

4. 1990Society

   US 'Decade of the Brain' declared

   First national-scale commitment to brain science funding.

5. 1997AI

   Deep Blue beats Kasparov

   Symbolic search beats a human world champion at chess.

6. 1998AI

   LeNet-5 for digit recognition

   LeCun's CNN proves convolutional architectures work at scale.

1. 2005Neurotech

   BrainGate first human BCI implant

   A paralyzed patient controls a cursor with thoughts — clinical BCI is real.

2. 2012AI

   AlexNet wins ImageNet

   Deep CNNs on GPUs cut error rates in half; deep learning boom begins.

3. 2013Society

   US BRAIN Initiative + EU Human Brain Project

   Multi-billion-dollar coordinated push to map and simulate brains.

4. 2014AI

   GANs invented

   Generative adversarial networks unlock realistic synthesis.

5. 2016AI

   AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol

   Deep RL + tree search masters a game once thought decades away.

1. 2017AI

   Transformer architecture

   'Attention Is All You Need' — the substrate of every modern LLM.

2. 2018AI

   BERT + GPT

   Large pretrained language models redefine NLP.

3. 2020AI

   GPT-3

   Scaling laws demonstrated; few-shot learning emerges from scale alone.

4. 2020Neurotech

   Neuralink demos N1 in primates

   High-channel-count invasive BCI enters public consciousness.

5. 2021Neuroscience

   First petavoxel connectome slice (H01)

   Google + Harvard release a cubic-millimeter human cortex reconstruction.

6. 2022AI

   ChatGPT launches

   LLMs go mainstream; 100M users in 2 months.

7. 2023Neurotech

   Speech decoding from cortex at conversational rates

   UCSF/Stanford BCIs restore speech to ALS patients.

1. 2024AI

   Agentic AI + long-context models

   Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 push context to millions of tokens; agent frameworks proliferate.

2. 2024Neurotech

   Neuralink first human implant

   First patient controls a computer with a fully wireless BCI.

3. 2025Society

   Brain economy crosses $2T

   Neurotech, NeuroAI, brain health, and cognitive productivity sectors formally tracked as an integrated economy.

4. 2025AI

   Neuromorphic chips commercial

   Intel Loihi 3, IBM NorthPole, and startups ship brain-inspired silicon at production scale.

5. 2026AI

   BRAINMATTER HI vs AI Index published

   First scored, dimension-by-dimension comparison of human and artificial intelligence for the brain economy era.

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