The story behind the screen — serialized, in-depth, and built for readers who want more than a Wikipedia summary.https://ishistory.pages.dev/en-ushttps://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/p26-sam-altman-returns/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/p26-sam-altman-returns/The sequel to P16 — Sam Altman's return to OpenAI after the November 2023 board crisis and the year that followed. The year of GPT-4o, the for-profit conversion, the $157 billion valuation, the Sutskever departure, the AGI rhetoric escalation, the Apple partnership, and the deeper question of what the year revealed about OpenAI's mission and Altman's position in the AI industry.Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTKey FigureSam AltmanOpenAIBoard CrisisFor-Profit ConversionGPT-4oMinds & MachinesProfiledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/nyt-v-openai/https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/nyt-v-openai/NYT v. OpenAI — the December 2023 lawsuit that will likely define whether training LLMs on copyrighted articles is fair use or infringement.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTNYT v. OpenAICopyrightFair UseAI TrainingLawsuitdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/getty-images-v-stability-ai/https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/getty-images-v-stability-ai/Getty v. Stability AI — the January 2023 lawsuit over Stable Diffusion's training on 12 million Getty photos and the 2025 UK ruling.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTGetty ImagesStability AIStable DiffusionCopyrightAI Trainingdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/colorado-state-fair-ai-art/https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/colorado-state-fair-ai-art/The Colorado State Fair — August 2022, when Jason Allen's "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" became the first AI-generated image to win a fine-art competition.Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTColorado State FairAI ArtJason AllenMidjourneyThéâtre D'opéra Spatialdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/open-vs-closed-ai/https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/open-vs-closed-ai/Hugging Face, LLaMA, Mistral, DeepSeek — the open-weights movement and why open vs closed is the defining AI industry fault line of the 2020s.Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTOpen Source AIOpen WeightsLLaMAMistralDeepSeekdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/stable-diffusion-release/https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/stable-diffusion-release/Stable Diffusion — Stability AI's August 2022 open-weights release that democratised image generation, triggered artist lawsuits, and seeded the open-AI debate.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTStable DiffusionStability AIEmad MostaqueLatent DiffusionOpen Weightsdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a26-the-future-of-creativity/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a26-the-future-of-creativity/The story of what generative AI is doing to the creative professions — art, music, writing, and the deeper question of what creativity means when the boundary between the artist's idea and the machine's contribution becomes impossible to draw. The cultural and economic transformation that the technical breakthroughs of the previous decade have produced, and what it means for the relationship between humans and the work of making things.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTAI and CreativityGenerative ArtAI MusicAI WritingAuthorshipCreative EconomyMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/e26-the-open-source-wars/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/e26-the-open-source-wars/The story of the open source AI movement — from Meta's LLaMA leak in March 2023 through DeepSeek-R1's January 2025 release that triggered a US stock market rout. The debate between open and closed AI, what open source AI has enabled, what risks it has introduced, and the specific governance question of whether the open source model is compatible with the safety requirements of frontier AI.Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTKey EventOpen Source AILLaMAMistralDeepSeekOpen WeightsMinds & MachinesEventdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/liang-wenfeng-deepseek/https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/liang-wenfeng-deepseek/Liang Wenfeng — the hedge-fund founder behind DeepSeek, whose January 2025 R1 release triggered a US stock rout and reset the AI race.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTLiang WenfengDeepSeekHigh-FlyerOpen WeightsChina AIdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/deepseek-r1-and-the-ai-race/https://ishistory.pages.dev/blog/beyond/minds-and-machines/deepseek-r1-and-the-ai-race/DeepSeek-R1 — the January 2025 release that matched OpenAI's o1 at a fraction of the cost, triggered a $589B NVIDIA stock rout, and reset the AI race.Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTDeepSeek-R1Reasoning ModelsNVIDIAAI RaceOpen Weightsdr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a1-the-ancient-dream-of-artificial-life/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a1-the-ancient-dream-of-artificial-life/From Talos and the Golem to Mary Shelley — how humans dreamed of artificial life thousands of years before the computer. The deep roots of AI in myth, philosophy, and the craftsman's obsession with creating minds.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a2-clockwork-wonders-the-automata-era/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a2-clockwork-wonders-the-automata-era/Before electricity, craftsmen across Europe built mechanical marvels that walked, wrote, and played music. The extraordinary story of the automata era and the question it forced the world to ask about what it means to be alive.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a3-the-philosophers-who-asked-can-machines-think/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a3-the-philosophers-who-asked-can-machines-think/Leibniz dreamed of a calculus of thought. Descartes drew the line between mind and machine. The thinkers who laid the conceptual groundwork — and the questions they left unanswered for three centuries.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a4-ada-lovelace-and-the-first-algorithm/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a4-ada-lovelace-and-the-first-algorithm/The actual mathematics of the Notes on the Analytical Engine, what the Bernoulli number algorithm actually did, and why the ideas in those footnotes were more radical than even most computer scientists realise.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a5-alan-turing-the-man-who-imagined-everything/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a5-alan-turing-the-man-who-imagined-everything/The full narrative arc of Turing's intellectual journey — from the Turing Machine to Bletchley Park to the 1950 paper to morphogenesis. How one mind laid the foundations of an entire civilisation's technology.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a6-the-summer-that-named-ai/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a6-the-summer-that-named-ai/The 1956 Dartmouth Conference — who was in the room, what they argued about, what they got right, and what they got catastrophically wrong. The week a scattered research tradition became a field.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a7-the-first-ai-programs-teaching-machines-to-play-games/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a7-the-first-ai-programs-teaching-machines-to-play-games/Arthur Samuel's checkers program, early chess AI, and the first signs that machines could learn. The exhilarating early years when every new demonstration felt like proof that general machine intelligence was just around the corner.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a8-eliza-and-the-illusion-of-understanding/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a8-eliza-and-the-illusion-of-understanding/Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 chatbot fooled everyone — including people who knew it was a program. What its reception revealed about human psychology, and why its creator became AI's most passionate critic.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a9-the-optimists-when-ai-was-going-to-solve-everything/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a9-the-optimists-when-ai-was-going-to-solve-everything/The bold 1960s predictions, the government funding, and the intoxicating early hype. What made the founders of AI so confident, why the optimism was not entirely irrational, and how the gap between promise and reality slowly opened.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a10-the-first-ai-winter-when-the-dream-crashed/https://ishistory.pages.dev/articles/minds-and-machines/a10-the-first-ai-winter-when-the-dream-crashed/The Lighthill Report, the funding cuts, the broken promises — and why the first era of AI collapsed. The story of how the gap between ambition and achievement finally became impossible to ignore.Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTartificial-intelligencehistoryaiMinds & MachinesArticledr.ishaan@atomicmail.io (Ishaan)