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Lesson 10 · Module 2

Major Milestones That Changed the World

AI didn't improve gradually — it had breakthrough moments that surprised everyone.

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Key milestones include: 1997 — IBM's Deep Blue defeats chess champion Garry Kasparov. 2011 — IBM Watson wins Jeopardy! against human champions. 2016 — AlphaGo beats the world's best Go player. 2017 — the "Attention Is All You Need" paper introduces the Transformer architecture, the foundation of modern ChatGPT-like models. 2022–2023 — the launch of ChatGPT brings generative AI to millions of people worldwide.

Each milestone showed new capabilities and opened doors to further progress. They moved AI from laboratories into everyday life and changed how we think about machine intelligence.

These breakthroughs were possible because of steady improvements in algorithms, data availability, and computing hardware. They remind us that AI progress often comes in surprising leaps.

Key takeaways

Major milestones include Deep Blue, Watson, AlphaGo, and ChatGPT.
Each breakthrough expanded what people thought was possible.
The Transformer (2017) enabled today's language models.
AI is now part of mainstream culture and daily tools.

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