I read every major CS paper of the last 100 years...
Fireship
Jun 17, 2026
Modern AI is not a sudden miracle but the result of a century-long chain reaction of scientific breakthroughs. From Alan Turing’s definition of the algorithm to the massive scale of today’s Transformers, intelligence emerged when researchers combined the right mathematical foundations—backpropagation, information theory, and distributed computing—with unprecedented amounts of data and compute.
Key insight: Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, accidentally invented the spiritual ancestor to modern AI’s loss function when he used human guessing to measure the 'entropy' of English—the exact same principle used today to train large language models.
