Is AI where the Web was in 1994?
The release of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT feels like the defining moment for artificial intelligence in the same way that the first popular web browser, Mosaic, was for the World Wide Web.
I remember writing a story about the early World Wide Web for my college newspaper in 1990. I had been aware of the Internet (technologies like Telnet and Gopher), but very few had heard of the Internet at that time, and even fewer understood the future impact.
But then a team at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing in 1993 released Mosaic, the first Web browser to be widely accessible to browse the Internet. The Mosaic web browser was important because it was the first to make the World Wide Web accessible to a wide audience. Before Mosaic, the web was primarily used by scientists and academics. Mosaic introduced key features that made the web more accessible, including a graphical user interface, support for images and multimedia, and the ability to easily navigate between pages using hyperlinks. Mosaic’s success helped to popularize the web and paved the way for developing other widely-used browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
The release of the Mosaic web browser was built on 30 years of research, beginning with the ARPANET project in 1966, leading to the famous story of the first…
