I am tired of reading and hearing statements by press and politicians alike that companies like OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) started the AI revolution. Just today, with the announcement of the Stargate data centre project, the BBC's Verify (?!) website stated "OpenAI kicked off the AI race in 2022". I'm not claiming that a little company in London called Tome Associates Ltd, of which I was a founding director, started AI in the 1980s. There were already plenty of people exploring it around the world at the time. Indeed a project called Logic Theorist, developed in 1955 by Newell and Simon at the Rand Corporation in California, is probably the world's first AI application. But to the best of my knowledge, Tome Associates were the first company in the world to launch a commercial product based on AI... which subsequently met a resounding blank look from everyone we showed it to. People were fascinated, but confused about what to do with it (don't forget Tim ...
In case you can't read it, I've transcribed it at the foot of this post. I am particularly proud of the quote in the final paragraph. Despite trying incredibly hard, all over the world, to get people excited about AI applied to search technology, few understood what we were pioneering in a tiny company called Tome Associates in London from 1986 until we ran out of money in 1991. We started the company 3 years before Tim Berners Lee invented the worldwide web. We were also accredited as the first company in the world to launch an AI product known as Tome Searcher. Ho hum. What might have been... sigh. THE TIMES TUESDAY MARCH 8 1988 TECHNOLOGY Growing too big for their own good Cartoon by Smith By Robert Matthews Technology Correspondent Last week, London-based Tome Associates unveiled the result of four years' research into a problem that is becoming more pressing with each day that passes: information databases are just too big for their own good. Since the late ...