Technology & Innovation

No single person invented artificial intelligence. The theoretical groundwork was laid by British mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930s and 1940s, but AI became an actual field of study in the summer of 1956, when computer scientist John McCarthy organized the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence — the event where McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” itself. He worked alongside Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester to plan it, and it’s this small group, not one lone inventor, that historians usually credit with founding AI as a discipline.

An AI chip (also known as an AI accelerator or AI processor) is a specialized silicon processor engineered to perform the complex mathematical operations behind machine learning and deep learning. Unlike traditional CPUs that process general tasks sequentially, AI chips excel at performing massive parallel calculations—such as matrix multiplication and tensor processing—at high speeds and lower power consumption. Common types include GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs.