Open source is actually the cradle of artificial intelligence. Here's why

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In a way, open source and artificial intelligence were born together. 

Back in 1971, if you'd mentioned AI to most people, they might have thought of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. However, AI was already a real subject that year at MIT, where Richard M. Stallman (RMS) joined MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab. 

The Intersection of Generative AI and Engineering

The surge of generative AI can harness tremendous potential for the engineering realm. It can also come with its challenges, as enterprises and engineers alike figure out the impact of AI on their roles, business strategies, data, solutions, and product development. What does the future roadmap look like for bringing generative AI into the software fold? ZDNET decodes from all angles.

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Years later, as proprietary software sprang up, RMS developed the radical idea of Free Software. Decades later, this concept, transformed into open source, would become the birthplace of modern AI.

It wasn't a science-fiction writer but a computer scientist, Alan Turing, who started the modern AI movement. Turing's 1950 paper Computing Machine and Intelligence originated the Turing Test. The test, in brief, states that if a machine can fool you into thinking that you're talking with a human being, it's intelligent.

According to some people, today's AIs can already do this. I don't agree, but we're clearly on our way.

Also: The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT and alternatives

In 1960, computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" and, along the way, created the Lisp language.  McCarthy's achievement, as computer scientist Paul Graham put it, "did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple operators and a notation for functions, you can build a whole programming language."

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