I used to think AI just showed up one day in 2022, fully formed, ready to write my emails. Then I ran into a post that completely reframed it for me. The author, a founder who thinks about technology at a structural level, laid out the whole 80-year story behind the tools we use now. I was genuinely hooked reading it.
Here’s the point that stuck with me most. This creator says most founders treat AI as a feature. A bolt-on. Something to add to the stack. But that’s the wrong lens. It’s a platform shift that took eight decades to arrive, and if you don’t understand the arc, you’ll keep misreading where it’s headed next.
The original poster puts it simply: context matters. Not just context about your customers or your market, but context about the technology itself. The founders building the most durable things right now know exactly which era they’re operating in, and they build accordingly.
The full arc, era by era
Here’s the timeline this expert mapped out, and honestly it’s fascinating to see it all in one place:
- 1943 to 1955: Logic, computation, and the first neuron models. The foundations.
- 1956 to 1969: The term “Artificial Intelligence” gets coined. Symbolic AI and early chatbots follow.
- 1970 to 1979: First AI Winter. Reality catches up with the hype and funding dries up.
- 1980 to 1987: Expert Systems. AI starts getting used in finance, medicine, and industry.
- 1988 to 1993: Second AI Winter. Expert systems prove too costly to scale.
- 1994 to 2011: Machine Learning Era. AI learns from data instead of rules. IBM Deep Blue beats Kasparov in 1997.
- 2012 to 2017: Deep Learning Revolution. AlexNet changes computer vision, AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol, and neural networks finally scale.
- 2018 to 2021: Transformer Era. Large Language Models emerge with massive gains in language understanding.
- 2022 to 2024: Generative AI. ChatGPT and similar tools bring AI mainstream. Content generation becomes the focus.
- 2025 to 2026: Agentic AI. Agents plan, reason, use tools, and execute tasks. Multi-agent systems become the new normal.
Where this is headed next
This is where the future-cast gets interesting. Based on the arc, the creator sees the next 1 to 3 years pointing toward a few clear shifts:
- More autonomous agents that act without hand-holding
- Better memory and reasoning across long tasks
- AI-native software and businesses built from the ground up
- Human and AI collaborative workforces working side by side
The companies building inside this shift now, not waiting to see where it lands, are the ones that will define what comes after.
What you can do about it today
I think this framing is quietly powerful, and here’s how I’d act on it. Figure out which era your product actually lives in. If you’re still shipping a generative-AI feature while the ground shifts to agents that plan and execute, you’re building for the era that’s already passing. Ask whether your software assumes a human clicks every button, or whether an agent could drive it. That single question tells you a lot about how durable your build really is.
The person who shared this said something I keep coming back to: one of the things they learned too late was how much the technology’s own history matters. You don’t need to memorize every date. You just need to know the direction of travel so you’re building toward what’s coming, not patching what’s already here.
The original post also includes an infographic that maps every era, its focus, and what changed in each period. Give the full LinkedIn post a proper look, and pass it along to any founder who still thinks AI is just a ChatGPT subscription.