John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky Found the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project

The heart of AI has been tugged by academia, industry and most worryingly the military for the entirety of its existence. Here we see that pattern play out in action as McCarthy and Minsky's legendary AI research lab had roots in academia before jettisoning to DARPA and the military industrial complex.

In 1959 John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky founded the Artificial Intelligence Project at MIT, the institute's first coordinated AI research, within the Research Laboratory of Electronics and the Computation Center.

AI was vague from the start, as no written proposal was ever made. When the laboratory's director, Jerome Wiesner, asked what they needed, McCarthy recalled, "we asked for a room, two programmers, a secretary and a keypunch." Wiesner also had them supervise some of six mathematics graduate students. But this was a huge development as McCarthy's LISP was implemented there.

Later, in 1963, the lab joined the DARPA-funded Project MAC. The MIT AI Lab later split off from Project MAC and in 2003 merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to form CSAIL.