Coined in this form by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay describing an "event horizon" beyond which superhuman, self-improving intelligence makes the future genuinely unknowable, building on I.J. Good's 1965 concept of an intelligence explosion. The term is often used loosely today to describe any large, hard-to-forecast AI-driven shift rather than Vinge's specific runaway-intelligence scenario — a gap researchers like François Chollet and Gary Marcus argue matters, since a metric or product accelerating is not the same claim as an unpredictable capability explosion.