Since its beginnings in the 1940s and 1950s, AI has made great bounds. Many of the technologies and ideas that we are utilizing today are directly based on these early discoveries. Over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, pioneers such as Geoffrey Hinton have pushed AI forward through peaks and busts. Today, we are on track to achieve sustained AI development for the foreseeable future.
The development of AI technology has been closely aligned with the development of new hardware and increasingly large data sources. As we'll see throughout this book, great AI applications are built with data constraints and hardware optimization in mind. The next chapter will introduce you to the fundamentals of machine learning and AI. We will also cover probability theory, linear algebra, and other elements that will lay the groundwork for the future chapters.