Connectionists: FW: AI at 50 videos...

Wed Aug 19 17:52:04 EDT 2026

I heard a story that when the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence was being created, a decision “was made” to exclude pattern recognition from the list of topics, and this resulted in the separation between the PAMI community and the rest of AI. Can anyone confirm whether this is true? It is certainly consistent with McCarthy’s goals. If so, it wasn’t specifically neural network models that were excluded, but pretty much anything with real (or floating point) numbers, probabilities, etc.

--Tom

Thomas G. Dietterich, University Distinguished Professor (Emeritus)
School of EECS, Oregon State University
US Mail: 1148 Kelley Engineering Center, Corvallis, OR 97331-5501 USA
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https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~tgd/

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of Michael Arbib
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2026 11:39 AM
To: Terry Sejnowski <terry at snl.salk.edu>; director at inc.ucsd.edu; Fellous, Jean-Marc <jmfellous at UCSD.EDU>; connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu; Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: FW: AI at 50 videos...

[This email originated from outside of OSU. Use caution with links and attachments.]
An added historical note. The same activity that led to the Dartmouth meeting also led to the book

Shannon, C. E., & McCarthy, J. (1956). Automata studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

It contains classic papers on finite automata, Turing machines, and (on a more speculative note, with British authors) synthesis of automata.

Worth a look even now, but with a very different emphasis on GOFAI. I suppose Turing is the bridge.

________________________________
From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>> on behalf of Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu<mailto:jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>>
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2026 7:24 AM
To: Terry Sejnowski <terry at snl.salk.edu<mailto:terry at snl.salk.edu>>; director at inc.ucsd.edu<mailto:director at inc.ucsd.edu> <director at inc.ucsd.edu<mailto:director at inc.ucsd.edu>>; Fellous, Jean-Marc <jmfellous at UCSD.EDU<mailto:jmfellous at UCSD.EDU>>; connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: FW: AI at 50 videos...

Yes, historically this was an important meeting --and indeed the term AI was coined by John McCarthy who with several others put together the 1955 meeting; McCarthy also invented LISP after this meeting. Part of the AI meeting at DM was political. 

Yes, historically this was an important meeting --and indeed the term AI was coined by John McCarthy who with several others put together the 1955 meeting;  McCarthy also invented LISP after this meeting.   Part of the AI meeting at DM was political. McCarthy deliberately chose "Artificial Intelligence" partly to distance the new effort from Wiener's cybernetics and the neural network tradition. Which was thematic in the MACY meetings.. which ended in 1953--2 years before the "AI" meeting.  McCarthy wanted to stake out a separate field with a symbolic/logical emphasis (in contrast to McCulloch and Pitts). So the naming wasn't just descriptive; it was a bit of a territorial move that arguably sidelined neural networks for decades until the connectionist revival in the 1980s (sorry Juergen).  And the more recent revolution associated with DL and LLMs more specifically.  In the 1970s, this fueled the long term debate in Cognitive Science on Symbols/Rules vs Vectors/NN.

Well at least we know how that turned out.

Stephen

On 8/17/26 13:30, Terry Sejnowski wrote:
Jean-Marc -

I was there and gave a talk, the only one on neural networks.  I learned a lot from the other speakers.

I just listened to the questions at the end of my talk.  I pretty much predicted what was going to happen in AI and thought it would take 50 years.  I was wrong, it took less than 20 years.

One of the questions at the end was about intelligent aliens who appear and don't have human brains.
This was a set piece in my recent book on ChatGPT and the Future of AI, where ChatGPT is the alien.

I gave my version of that meeting in my first book on the Deep Learning Revolution.  Every talk that reported progress did so because they had enough data to analyze, including Gene Charniak who was trying to parse sentences and Takeo Kanade working on computer vision (These two talks are not included in the list).  At the end Marvin Minsky accused them for just working on applications, not real AI.

Terry

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On 8/17/2026 9:18 AM, Fellous, Jean-Marc wrote:

In case you did not see this: Some amazing lectures and (now historical) perspectives… the most interesting parts are when they tried and predicted the future of AI!

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu><mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of George Cybenko
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2026 6:00 AM
To: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Connectionists: AI at 50 videos...

In 2006, we held a 50th anniversary conference at Dartmouth to commemorate

the historic 1956 meeting that coined the term "artificial intelligence."  At that time,

five of the surviving original participants attended.  Today they are all gone.

I just recently posted videos of the talks from the AI at 50 meeting at

https://sites.dartmouth.edu/cybenko/dartmouth-ai50-videos/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/sites.dartmouth.edu/cybenko/dartmouth-ai50-videos/__;!!Mih3wA!HX5M154b9l4fIHZdxakK00FZ4H1IPqVHrV_pC-lh-4XwoZ6CvDp7SyXZ-ObDk5oWYIct3ux47KDlf3KvyIoMq7VLCwxY0JhC$>

INobody foresaw what is happening in AI today and in fact,

there were several digs against neural networks etc.

Enjoy!

Regards

George Cybenko

--

George Cybenko, Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering

Dartmouth College, 8000 Cummings Hall, Hanover NH 03755 USA

email:          gvc at dartmouth.edu<mailto:gvc at dartmouth.edu>

FAX:            603 646-9024

Cell:           603 369-1133

Assistant:      Ellen Wirta, 603 646-9672, Ellen.K.Wirta at Dartmouth.edu<mailto:Ellen.K.Wirta at Dartmouth.edu>

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