I keep hearing people say AI showed up out of nowhere with ChatGPT. It didn’t. I’ve been watching pieces of this story assemble for close to 50 years, through graphics chips, game AI, machine vision, speech, and parallel computing. Nobody planned the sequence. Each generation just solved its own problem and moved on, with no idea what it was building toward.
Looking back now, the path reads almost too clean: Lookup tables became digital humans, digital humans became machine learning, and machine learning became the GPU-powered AI infrastructure running everything today.
I remember arguing about AI in games back in the mid-1980s, years before GPUs existed. Back then, “AI” meant a stack of lookup tables telling an enemy in a first-person shooter when to duck or charge. The tables kept growing, the behavior kept looking sharper, and pretty soon everybody just assumed games came with smart characters built in.
