The First AI to Learn from Experience is a 40-Year-Old Chess Player - Apparently.
In 1983, a chess-playing computer program named Deep Thought was developed by a team of researchers led by Donald Knuth. The program was able to learn from its own experience and improve its chess-playing abilities, a feat considered a major milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. Deep Thought was later used to develop the chess-playing program that would go on to defeat the world chess champion in 1997.
This fact is verifiable through various sources, including the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum.