Indie pixel-art documentary traces AI history from Perceptron to Transformers
El-Alangute · reddit · 2026-10-11
An indie creator spent months researching how AI evolved from the 1950s Perceptron to today's LLMs and turned it into a pixel-art documentary, Building Intelligence, free on YouTube in late November 2026.
- Covers Rosenblatt's Perceptron, Minsky and symbolic AI, the Cyc project, backpropagation, distributed representations, Hinton, and the Transformer.
- Key insight: AI's history is deeply connected — ideas from decades apart fit one story, often dismissed before coming back to matter.
- Focuses on problems researchers hit and how each solution attempt led somewhere new.
- Made with pixel-art visuals, some AI-assisted animation, on-camera narration; crowdfunded on Kickstarter.
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