The first was never “AI” in a CS context

Mostly because CS didn’t start talking about AI until after popular perception had pushed calculators into the “dumb automatons” category.

Image classifiers came after CS drew the “magic” line for what qualifies as AI, so CS has piles of academic literature talking about artificially intelligent image classification, but public perception moves on.

The definition has been pretty consistent since at least Alan Turing, if not earlier.

I think Turing already had adding machines before he developed his “test.”

The current round of LLMs seem more than capable of passing the Turing test if they are configured to try to. In the 1980s, the Eliza chat program could pass the Turing test for three or four exchanges with most people. These past weeks, I have had extended technical conversations with LLMs and they exhibit sustained “average” knowledge of our topics of discussion. Not the brightest bulb on the tree, but they’re widely read and can pretty much keep up with the average bear on the internet in terms of repeating what others have written.

Meanwhile, there’s a virulent public perception backlash calling LLMs “dumb automatons.” Personally, I don’t care what the classification is. “AI” has been “5 years away from realization” my whole life, and I’ve worked with “near AI” tech all that time. The current round of tools have made an impressive leap in usefulness. Bob Cratchit would have said the same about an adding machine if Scrooge had given him one.