This is Part 2 of a three-part series tracing the history of artificial intelligence. Part 1 covered AI’s philosophical origins, the Dartmouth Conference, and the AI winters. Part 2 picks up with the shift toward machine learning and traces the path to the founding of OpenAI. A New Approach: Learning From Data Instead of Rules By the end of Part 1, AI research had hit a wall. The symbolic, rule-based approaches of expert systems, sometimes retroactively called “Good Old Fashioned AI”, involved pre-programming knowledge and rules directly into a system. These approaches were brittle and difficult to scale. A quieter alternative had existed since the field’s earliest days but had…