Blueprints for Intelligence

A screenshot of a website showing a neural network diagram.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often illustrated with sci-fi characters. That's misleading. ‘Blueprints for Intelligence’ is a visual history of AI told through diagrams found in machine learning research papers from 1943 and 2020.

https://philippschmitt.com/blueprints-for-intelligence

This project doesn't focus on what the diagrams mean for researchers, but rather on what they reveal about the researchers themselves. It connects the visual representations of neural networks to the researchers' conceptions of cognition.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported in part by the Berggruen Institute ToftH Fellowship program.

I would like to thank to Yann LeCun and Jake Browning for their feedback and suggestions; Maya Indira Ganesh for working with me on the version of this project which, unfortunately, didn't make it to print; Mashinka Firunts Hakopian for her thoughtful editing; and Shannon Mattern for helping me navigate the publishing world.