Tim Berglund: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence (at BJUG and DJUG)

To RSVP, please go to BJUG or DJUG.

Dear Denver Open Source Users Group (DOSUG) members:
Are you interested in seeing the return of events at DOSUG? If yes, please send the organizer a message with any ideas you may have and possibly volunteer to assist with the group. Thank you!

This event is an FYI to let you know that former DOSUG organizer Tim Berglund will be giving an in-person talk on the history of Artificial Intelligence at Boulder Java Users Group on March 17 and at Denver Java Users Group on March 18.

Tim is an inspirational speaker and I highly recommend attending this presentation, as well as checking out his videos on YouTube, such as this one on Context Engineering .

Tim's abstract for the meeting:
Up until early 2023, I regularly said AI would always have a bright future—and I didn't mean that as a compliment. Sure, deep learning had made us good at building very impressive classifiers in the decade or so prior, but for so long, human-like intelligence was just five years in the future—and that made me a skeptic. Things are different now, but how much skepticism is still warranted? What is it that we've got on our hands? What changes is modern AI bringing with it? Like with so many other questions, the answers are easier if we understand where we've come from.
Beginning with the Turing Test itself, the famous Dartmouth Conference of 1956, and the Perceptron of 1957, we'll trace decades of disappointment and broken promises as we tried to realize the true potential of computing, at the same time grasping for an understanding of what it means to be human. Taking a close look at various technologies along the way, we'll arrive in the 21st century, the revival of neural networks, the advent of the Transformer, and a revolutionary new technology category that has prompted oracles of weal and woe from our most optimistic and apocalyptic technology prophets.
Standing on the edge of the unknown, what elements of the 75-year-old promise have we realized? A close examination gives us a better view of our immediate future as technologists and insight into what it means to be human.

About Tim Berglund:
Tim serves as the VP of Developer Relations at Confluent, where he and his team work to make streaming data and its emerging toolset accessible to all developers. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He lives with his wife in Arvada, CO, USA. He has three grown children, three step-children, and five grandchildren.

You can find Tim on LinkedIn.