Artificial intelligence became popular in waves: first in academic and tech circles from the 1950s onward, then as a business and consumer technology from the 1990sā€“2010s, and finally as a mainstream everyday topic with the rise of tools like ChatGPT around 2022ā€“2023.

Quick Scoop

  • The idea of AI: Formalized in the 1950s with Alan Turingā€™s work and the coining of the term ā€œartificial intelligenceā€ in 1955ā€“56, but this was mostly academic and research-focused.
  • Early popularity in tech: AI had ā€œboomā€ periods in the 1980s (expert systems) and then again from the 1990s to early 2010s as AI agents, robotics, and speech recognition started entering products and businesses.
  • Everyday consumer awareness: From roughly 1993ā€“2011, AI showed up in things like Roomba vacuums and commercial speech recognition on Windows, quietly making its way into daily life.
  • Modern mainstream moment: Many historians and commentators mark the early 2020sā€”especially the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and its viral spread in 2023ā€”as the point when ā€œAIā€ became a household, forum, and news obsession.

Mini Timeline: ā€œPopularā€ AI Moments

  • 1950sā€“60s:
    • Turingā€™s ā€œComputing Machinery and Intelligenceā€ and the Dartmouth workshop put AI on the intellectual map, but interest is mostly limited to scientists and policymakers.
  • 1980s ā€œAI boomā€:
    • Expert systems get big funding and hype in business and government; AI becomes a buzzword in industry, though it is still not widely visible to ordinary consumers.
  • 1990sā€“2010s:
    • AI agents, search algorithms, recommendation systems, and early consumer robots and voice tools start quietly shaping everyday lifeā€”people use them without always calling them ā€œAI.ā€
  • Midā€‘2010s:
    • Breakthroughs like DeepMindā€™s AlphaGo and advances in deep learning and transformers trigger massive investment and media coverage; ā€œAIā€ gains a modern, highā€‘stakes image.
  • 2022ā€“2023:
    • ChatGPT and widely accessible large language models push AI into mainstream culture, social media, classrooms, and workplaces; many forum users describe 2023 as when AI truly ā€œwent mainstream.ā€

How People on Forums Talk About It

Many forum and social users describe AI popularity less as a single date and more as several overlapping waves:

  • Some say the ā€œAI eraā€ started with AlphaGo (2016) or the transformer breakthrough (2017), because that is when serious investment and technical momentum exploded.
  • Others feel AI became personally relevant only when ChatGPT and similar tools appeared in late 2022, with 2023 remembered as the year everyone suddenly talked aboutā€”and triedā€”AI.
  • There is also a quieter view: social media feeds, recommendation engines, and targeted ads were already AIā€‘driven long before ChatGPT, so for these people AI had been ā€œpopularā€ behind the scenes for years.

Todayā€™s ā€œTrending Topicā€ Context

Right now (midā€‘2020s), AI is:

  • A central theme in tech news, business strategy, and public policy, driven by rapid progress in large language models and generative tools.
  • A frequent subject on forums and social platforms, where people debate jobs, creativity, ethics, and how much AI they actually use in daily life.
  • Deeply embedded in search, recommendations, content generation, and productivity tools, so ā€œAIā€ is both a visible trend and an invisible background technology at the same time.

Short Takeaway (TL;DR)

  • Historically: AI became ā€œpopularā€ in research and industry from the 1950s onward, with major booms in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • Public mainstream: For most everyday users and forum discussions, AI truly felt popular and everywhere starting around 2022ā€“2023 with ChatGPT and modern generative tools.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.