About

How This Guide Works

Whose voice you are reading, how hype and disagreement are handled, what the little coloured labels mean — and why some facts carry a date.

Whose voice is this?

AI Journey is written by a technologist who is still learning, for others who want to learn. It is a guide, not an encyclopedia: it chooses what matters most at each level and explains it as clearly as it can.

It tries to meet two standards at once:

Accessible — every idea explained in plain words first, with the jargon introduced only when you need it and always in the glossary.
Accurate — dates, names and claims checked against primary sources (the original papers and reports) or reliable histories, and never stretched to make a better story.

Hype, fear and honest uncertainty

No field is surrounded by more confident predictions than AI — of miracles, of catastrophe, of “AGI next year” and “it’s just autocomplete.” History is a good teacher here: the field has been wrong about its own future many times (see Lessons from History). This guide’s rule:

The rule

Say what is known, say what is argued about and by whom, and label forecasts as forecasts. Where serious people disagree, the page shows the main positions side by side in an indigo “Other views” box rather than choosing silently.

What the labels mean

Small coloured labels mark how settled a claim is:

ConsensusBroadly agreed by researchers and historians — for example, that backpropagation became widely used after 1986.
DebatedSerious experts disagree, often sharply — for example, whether today’s language models “understand” what they say.
SpeculativeA forecast or a hypothesis about the future, such as when (or whether) general AI will arrive. Treat it as a possibility, not a fact.
Popular mythA widely repeated claim that the evidence does not support — stated so it can be corrected.
This guide’s framingAn arrangement made by this guide to help learning — for example, the five-track ladder or dividing history into eras. Useful, but not an official scheme.

Dates on fast-moving facts

Model names, prices, benchmark scores, laws and company details change by the month. Where a page states something like that, it carries a dashed stamp such as As of 2026. When you see an old date, check a current source before relying on it. The history pages and the fundamentals of the tracks change far more slowly.

No sponsors, no favourites

Products and companies are named when they matter to the story or when a reader needs a concrete example — not as endorsements. Where a choice of tool is discussed, the guide explains how to choose rather than telling you what to buy, and prefers free and open options for practice.

Kinds of sources

Primary sources — the original papers, proposals and reports (Turing 1950, the Dartmouth proposal of 1955, the Lighthill Report of 1973, “Attention Is All You Need” of 2017, and so on). Each page lists them.
Histories — books such as Nils Nilsson’s The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, Pamela McCorduck’s Machines Who Think and Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.
Textbooks and courses — Russell and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville’s Deep Learning, and well-known free courses (see Resources).

Quotations are kept short and always attributed. Where a famous quotation is disputed or misattributed, the page says so.

Whose voices are missing

The standard history of AI is mostly told through a small number of men at American and British universities. That is part of the truth, but not all of it. This guide tries to include the women whose work was overlooked (from Ada Lovelace to Karen Spärck Jones and Fei-Fei Li), researchers outside the US and UK (from Kunihiko Fukushima in Japan to today’s labs in Asia and Europe), and the people affected by AI as well as those who build it. A page on AI in Malaysia is on the map. Gaps remain, and suggestions are welcome.

Your privacy

There is no account and there are no analytics or tracking scripts (the only outside service the pages call is Google Fonts, for the typefaces). Your reading progress, bookmarks, highlights and notes are stored only in your own browser; My Journey lets you back them up to a file.

Credits

Typefaces: Space Grotesk, Source Serif 4, Inter and JetBrains Mono, all under the SIL Open Font License. The site’s engine — reading progress, highlights, search and offline reading — is shared with its sister guide, Seeker. Corrections and suggestions are always welcome.