This document provides an introduction to neural networks and their history. It discusses how early research in the 1940s by McCulloch and Pitts laid the groundwork for the neural network approach by modeling the organization of neurons in the brain. Today, artificial neural networks are commonly used for tasks like classification and prediction through supervised and unsupervised learning methods. Recent advances include generative networks that can produce new output, and recurrent networks like LSTMs that are better able to process sequential data like text or video.