Infinite Road
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San FranciscoSan Jose

Tap a numbered dot and listen.

Narrated by The Chronicler Focus: Deep Learning History 79 km · about 56 min · 12 stories

Down the 101 through the history of artificial intelligence: Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron, John McCarthy naming the field, the AI winters that nearly killed it, and Fei-Fei Li's ImageNet — the dataset that ended the last one. Plus William Ralston, who built San Francisco and drowned the day his bank failed.

The stories

In order along the route. Tap a dot on the map, or play them here.

  1. 1
    San Francisco, California

    The Design of Lombard Street

  2. 2
    San Francisco, California

    Frank Rosenblatt and the Perceptron

  3. 3
    South San Francisco, California

    The Westbay Mountain Controversy

  4. 4
    San Francisco, California

    The Economics of AI Winters

  5. 5
    San Mateo, California

    The Architect Ernest Coxhead

  6. 6
    San Mateo, California

    The Rise and Fall of William Ralston

  7. 7
    Redwood City, California

    The Origins of Silicon Valley

  8. 8
    East Palo Alto, California

    John McCarthy and AI Formalism Deep Dive · Part 1 of 3

  9. 9
    Mountain View, California

    John McCarthy and AI Formalism Deep Dive · Part 2 of 3

  10. 10
    Sunnyvale, California

    John McCarthy and AI Formalism Deep Dive · Part 3 of 3

  11. 11
    San Jose, California

    Fei-Fei Li and ImageNet

  12. 12
    San Jose, California

    Richard Meier's Civic Vision

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Where the stories come from

Infinite Road draws from a library of primary sources — public-domain county histories, the WPA American Guide Series, National Register of Historic Places records, local records, and encyclopedic sources — then writes and narrates each story in its own words.