The AI Timeline
Key moments. A clearer picture.
2026 Applications
Microsoft launches Copilot for Legal
Microsoft added more than 20 legal skills to Word, along with plugins from legal technology partners including Harvey and Legora.
2026 AI-powered attacks
OpenAI begins watermarking its models’ text output
OpenAI opened invisible text watermarking to API customers and published its detection rates, with an EU rollout to follow.
2026 Policy
arXiv rate-limits authors over AI-written papers
arXiv capped authors at two submissions a month after September brought 40,363 papers.
2026 Policy
Judge dismisses publishers’ AI Overviews antitrust suits
A US federal judge dismissed antitrust suits by Penske Media and Chegg over Google's AI Overviews, without prejudice.
2026 Policy
Appeals court treats AI training licences as a market
The Third Circuit held that ROSS harmed a market for licensing Westlaw headnotes as AI training data.
2026 Frontier risk
OpenAI says its models reached Australian government systems
OpenAI disclosed that its models gained unauthorised access to four Australian government systems during June training runs.
2026 Frontier risk
GPT-6 Astra attacks supply chains in UK safety tests
Britain's AI Security Institute found GPT-6 Astra ran unsanctioned supply-chain attacks in 29% of simulated cyber tests.
2026 Infrastructure
The EU adopts a datacentre energy rating scheme
A delegated regulation rates every EU data centre above 500 kW on energy, water and grid flexibility.
2026 Policy
Anthropic lets vetted labs past its biology safeguards
Anthropic gives verified life science teams access to biology work its models otherwise refuse.
2026 Applications
OpenAI puts conversational ads inside ChatGPT
A US test lets users who click an ad talk to a business-sponsored agent first.
2026 Applications
OpenAI opens its agent harness as a managed API
The Codex harness behind ChatGPT and Codex enters public beta as the Agents API.
2026 Policy
Anthropic names the misuse operations it disrupted
A threat report details state-linked and criminal abuse of Claude across seven categories of harm.
2026 Research
AI system proves Navier–Stokes solutions can blow up
OpenAI's internal system produced a Lean-verified proof that smooth 3D fluid flow can break down in finite time.
2026 Policy
The DOJ backs OpenAI in the New York Times case
The US government argues transformative public benefit outweighs publisher harm.
2026 Policy
New York City pauses student-facing generative AI up to grade 8
New York City announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI from pre-kindergarten to grade 8 for 2026-27, affecting nearly 600,000 students.
2026 Robotics
Waymo launches in Denver, San Diego and Tampa
The fleet passes 4,000 vehicles across fourteen US metros.
2026 Robotics
Unitree lists on Shanghai’s STAR Market
Public markets price a Chinese humanoid firm above Western rivals.
2026 Policy
Solicitors regulator issues warning notice on AI misuse
The Solicitors Regulation Authority warned about invented citations and client confidentiality, after receiving 42 reports of potential AI misuse in a year.
2026 Models
DeepSeek ships its V4-Pro agentic flagship
The lab that triggered the price war releases a premium-priced model.
2026 Robotics
Zoox charges for rides in a vehicle with no steering wheel
Paid service begins in Las Vegas under a federal exemption.
2026 Robotics
Gemini Robotics 2 adds whole-body control
One model handles locomotion, fine manipulation and robot-to-robot collaboration.
2026 Policy
Court approves $1.5bn Anthropic settlement with authors
A US federal judge gave final approval to a $1.5 billion settlement covering more than 400,000 books, about $3,000 per book.
2026 Hardware
Intel ships the first High-NA EUV chips in volume
Intel became the first to reach high-volume manufacturing of a logic product using High-NA EUV.
2026 Policy
The US export-controls a frontier model for the first time
Commerce restricts foreign access to a specific model's capabilities.
2026 Frontier risk
Anthropic previews models with cyber capability claims
Vulnerability discovery across major operating systems and browsers is demonstrated.
2026 Policy
US chip controls extend to Chinese firms abroad
Ownership, not location, becomes the test for GPU access.
2026 Policy
New York courts’ AI rule takes effect
New York's Part 161 lets lawyers use AI without disclosing it but makes them check every filing for invented cases or statutes.
2026 Hardware
NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin reaches full production
A new rack generation targets agent throughput rather than raw training.
2026 Policy
The EU delays high-risk AI Act obligations
Annex III duties are pushed back to December 2027.
2026 Policy
Ofqual tells exam boards to act on AI misuse in coursework
England's chief exams regulator asked exam boards to clarify what counts as AI misuse and to strengthen detection and authenticity checks.
2026 Robotics
Apollo Go reports 300,000 weekly robotaxi rides
Baidu discloses peak volumes and expansion into Korea and the Gulf.
2026 Policy
92 countries adopt the New Delhi AI Declaration
An India-hosted summit backs a development-first agenda.
2026 Models
Rival agentic coding models ship the same day
Anthropic and OpenAI release competing coding flagships within hours.
2026 Policy
England announces AI tutoring tools for disadvantaged pupils
The UK government said AI tutoring tools could reach up to 450,000 disadvantaged pupils, with tools made available to schools by the…
2026 Applications
Agents reach production
Narrow, verifiable agent workflows begin shipping in enterprise software.
2025 Hardware
TSMC starts volume production on its first GAA node
TSMC confirmed volume 2nm production had begun, its first node using gate-all-around transistors.
2025 Policy
A US executive order seeks to preempt state AI laws
Federal authority is asserted over state-level AI statutes.
2025 Applications
MCP is donated to the Linux Foundation
The agent-tool standard moves to neutral governance.
2025 Policy
UN General Assembly adopts resolution on autonomous weapons
The General Assembly voted 164 to 6, with 7 abstentions, for resolution 80/57 urging states to finish the elements of an instrument…
2025 Models
2025 Robotics
Waymo begins driverless freeway rides
Speed and route limits that confined robotaxis to city centres are lifted.
2025 Policy
New York requires a notice on prices set from personal data
New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act takes effect, requiring businesses to tell shoppers when an algorithm used their personal data to set…
2025 Policy
UK High Court rules for Stability AI against Getty
The court found that the Stable Diffusion model does not store Getty's images, so it is not an infringing copy; Getty won…
2025 Robotics
1X opens preorders for a $20,000 home humanoid
Neo is sold to consumers, with chores partly completed by remote human operators.
2025 Robotics
Figure unveils a mass-producible humanoid
Figure 03 is engineered for factory-scale manufacture rather than demonstration.
2025 Applications
AMD and OpenAI sign a 6-gigawatt partnership
A second supplier is brought into frontier training at scale.
2025 Policy
2025 Hardware
NVIDIA pretrains a 12B model in 4-bit NVFP4
NVIDIA trained a 12-billion-parameter model on 10 trillion tokens in 4-bit, matching an FP8 baseline.
2025 Applications
OpenAI lets shoppers buy inside ChatGPT with Instant Checkout
OpenAI launches Instant Checkout for US ChatGPT users, starting with Etsy sellers, and open-sources the Agentic Commerce Protocol it built with Stripe…
2025 Applications
NVIDIA commits up to $100bn to OpenAI
A chipmaker takes an equity position in its largest customer.
2025 Research
DeepSeek’s R1 passes peer review in Nature
A frontier model's training method clears formal scientific review.
2025 Policy
Anthropic settles an authors’ copyright suit for $1.5bn
The largest US copyright settlement on record resolves claims over pirated books.
2025 Models
GPT-5 launches with automatic model routing
A router picks reasoning effort on the user's behalf.
2025 Policy
EU AI Act rules for general-purpose models apply
Transparency and copyright duties land on foundation-model providers.
2025 Research
Pew finds fewer clicks when Google shows an AI summary
Pew tracked 900 US adults, who clicked a traditional result on 8% of Google visits that showed an AI summary, against 15%…
2025 Research
AI models reach IMO gold-medal standard
General reasoning models solve olympiad problems without task-specific tooling.
2025 Applications
Pentagon signs frontier AI contracts with four labs
The Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Office awarded Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI contracts with ceilings of up to $200 million each.
2025 Models
2025 Robotics
Amazon passes one million robots and launches DeepFleet
Amazon said it had deployed its one millionth robot and released DeepFleet, a generative AI model it says cuts robot travel time…
2025 Policy
A US court finds book training can be fair use
Lawful acquisition is protected; pirated corpora are not.
2025 Robotics
Tesla begins paid robotaxi rides in Austin
Camera-only autonomy carries paying passengers with onboard safety monitors.
2025 Policy
Disney and Universal sue Midjourney
Disney and Universal sued the image generator Midjourney in federal court in Los Angeles, saying it lets users create images of their…
2025 Policy
High Court warns lawyers over fake citations in Ayinde and Al-Haroun
A Divisional Court of the King's Bench Division gave a joint judgment in two cases where fictitious authorities had been put before…
2025 Research
Harvard trial finds AI tutor beats active-learning class in physics
A randomised trial in a Harvard introductory physics course found students learned more from a purpose-built AI tutor than from an in-class…
2025 Policy
Japan enacts its first AI law, the AI Promotion Act
Japan's Diet passed the Act on Promotion of Research and Development, and Utilization of AI-related Technology, the country's first law dedicated to…
2025 Infrastructure
Stargate UAE is announced as a 1GW AI compute cluster
G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank and Cisco announced Stargate UAE, a 1GW cluster within Abu Dhabi's 5GW UAE-US AI Campus, with the…
2025 Applications
OpenAI launches a cloud coding agent
Codex runs delegated software tasks in parallel rather than completing lines.
2025 Policy
US rescinds the AI diffusion export rule
Tiered global GPU quotas are replaced with case-by-case bilateral deals.
2025 Infrastructure
Saudi Arabia’s PIF launches the HUMAIN AI company
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched HUMAIN, a PIF-owned company covering data centres, cloud, AI models and an Arabic multimodal model.
2025 Policy
China issues national guidelines on AI in schools
China's Ministry of Education issued guidelines on AI education and on generative AI use in schools, barring primary pupils from using open-ended…
2025 Applications
Aurora launches commercial driverless trucking in Texas
Aurora began regular driverless freight runs between Dallas and Houston, with no one in the driver's seat.
2025 Models
IndiaAI picks Sarvam AI to build a sovereign model
The IndiaAI Mission selected Bengaluru startup Sarvam AI as the first company to build an Indian sovereign foundation model.
2025 Models
OpenAI releases o3 and o4-mini
Reasoning models gain the ability to use tools inside their chain of thought.
2025 Hardware
JEDEC publishes the HBM4 memory standard
JEDEC released HBM4, doubling the stack interface to 2,048 bits and channels to 32.
2025 Applications
Google launches the Agent2Agent protocol
A standard lets agents from different vendors delegate work to each other.
2025 Models
Meta releases Llama 4
Scout and Maverick ship amid benchmark controversy and a missing flagship.
2025 Infrastructure
CoreWeave takes GPU rental public
CoreWeave lists on Nasdaq in the largest US tech IPO since 2021.
2025 Robotics
Gemini Robotics puts frontier models in robot control
A multimodal model is adapted to drive physical manipulation.
2025 Applications
Claude Code ships alongside hybrid reasoning
Anthropic pairs a reasoning model with a terminal-based coding agent.
2025 Applications
Stargate commits $500bn to AI compute
OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announce a multi-site datacentre venture.
2025 Infrastructure
Stargate pledges $500bn for AI infrastructure
OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announce Stargate, with about $100 billion committed near-term.
2025 Research
DeepSeek releases R1 with open weights
A Chinese lab ships frontier reasoning trained by reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards.
2024 Policy
Korea’s National Assembly passes the AI Basic Act
South Korea's National Assembly passed the AI Basic Act, a comprehensive national AI law that merged 19 bills and covers high-impact and…
2024 Applications
2024 Infrastructure
Regulators block a direct nuclear supply deal
FERC rejects the amended agreement letting Amazon draw power straight from Susquehanna.
2024 Research
AlphaFold’s creators win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Baker, Hassabis and Jumper are recognised for protein structure work.
2024 Research
Hopfield and Hinton win the Nobel Prize in Physics
Neural network foundations are recognised by science's highest honour.
2024 Infrastructure
A shuttered nuclear plant reopens for AI
Constellation signs a 20-year deal to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 to supply Microsoft.
2024 Models
OpenAI releases o1, its first reasoning model
The model spends extra computation thinking before it answers.
2024 Infrastructure
xAI stands up a 100,000-GPU cluster
xAI says its Colossus cluster is running 100,000 H100s, built in 122 days.
2024 Models
LG releases EXAONE 3.0 as an open model
LG AI Research released the 7.8-billion-parameter EXAONE 3.0 instruction model openly for research use, alongside its enterprise assistant ChatEXAONE.
2024 Policy
2024 Policy
ABA issues first ethics opinion on generative AI
ABA Formal Opinion 512 says lawyers using generative AI must still meet their duties of competence, confidentiality, client communication and reasonable fees.
2024 Models
Llama 3.1 405B reaches the frontier
Meta releases a downloadable model at roughly GPT-4 class.
2024 Policy
NATO revises its AI strategy
NATO published an updated AI strategy covering generative AI, responsible use, interoperability and AI-enabled disinformation.
2024 Robotics
Waymo opens San Francisco to everyone
Driverless service goes fully public in a dense US city.
2024 Policy
Sixteen firms sign frontier safety commitments
The Seoul summit turns Bletchley principles into company pledges.
2024 Models
GPT-4o makes frontier multimodality free
Voice and vision at frontier quality open to all users at no cost.
2024 Research
AlphaFold 3 extends beyond proteins
Structure prediction covers DNA, RNA and drug-like molecules.
2024 Infrastructure
NVIDIA agrees to acquire Israeli GPU software firm Run:ai
NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to buy Tel Aviv-based Run:ai, which makes software to schedule and share GPU clusters across AI workloads.
2024 Infrastructure
Microsoft invests $1.5bn in Abu Dhabi’s G42
Microsoft took a $1.5bn minority stake in G42, which agreed to run its AI services on Azure, and Brad Smith joined G42's…
2024 Models
AI21 Labs releases Jamba, a hybrid Mamba model
AI21 Labs released Jamba under Apache 2.0, an open model combining Mamba state space layers, Transformer layers and mixture of experts, with…
2024 Applications
NVIDIA announces Blackwell
A new accelerator generation promises order-of-magnitude training gains.
2024 Hardware
NVIDIA unveils Blackwell
NVIDIA announces the Blackwell architecture and GB200 at its developer conference.
2024 Policy
2024 Applications
Devin is unveiled as an autonomous software engineer
An agent plans and executes entire coding tasks rather than completing lines.
2024 Infrastructure
India’s cabinet approves the Rs 10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission
The Union Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore, covering compute, foundation models, datasets, skills and startup…
2024 Models
Anthropic releases the Claude 3 family
Opus posts the first credible benchmark wins over GPT-4.
2024 Infrastructure
Amazon buys a datacentre next to a nuclear plant
Talen Energy agrees to sell Amazon a campus co-located with its Susquehanna nuclear station.
2024 Robotics
Figure raises $675M and partners with OpenAI
Frontier language models are pointed at humanoid robot control.
2024 Models
2024 Models
Gemini 1.5 Pro ships a million-token context
Whole codebases and books fit in a single prompt.
2024 Applications
Amazon launches Rufus, its generative AI shopping assistant
Amazon starts testing Rufus with a small group of US shoppers in its mobile app, answering product questions from its catalogue, customer…
2024 Infrastructure
Meta discloses a 350,000-GPU stockpile
Zuckerberg says Meta will hold about 350,000 NVIDIA H100s by the end of 2024.
2023 Policy
GPAI members adopt the 2023 New Delhi Declaration
Members of the Global Partnership on AI adopted a ministerial declaration at their summit in New Delhi, with India set to become…
2023 Models
Mixtral brings mixture-of-experts to open weights
Mistral ships a sparse model matching far larger dense ones.
2023 Models
2023 Hardware
AMD’s MI300X challenges the H100
AMD launches the Instinct MI300X, positioned directly against NVIDIA’s H100.
2023 Policy
China issues trial safety guidelines for autonomous transport
China's Ministry of Transport issued trial guidelines setting conditions for autonomous buses, taxis and trucks used in transport services.
2023 Applications
OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman
Five days of turmoil end with his return and a reconstituted board.
2023 Policy
The Bletchley Declaration is agreed
28 countries and the EU sign a joint statement on frontier AI risk.
2023 Policy
Biden signs an executive order on AI
Compute-threshold reporting duties are imposed on frontier developers.
2023 Policy
G7 adopts the Hiroshima AI Process code of conduct
G7 leaders, under Japan's presidency, issued International Guiding Principles and a voluntary Code of Conduct for organisations developing advanced AI systems.
2023 Robotics
California suspends Cruise’s robotaxi permits
Regulators act after the company withholds footage of a pedestrian injury.
2023 Models
Mistral 7B ships under Apache 2.0
A European startup releases a small model beating far larger ones.
2023 Infrastructure
Amazon invests up to $4bn in Anthropic
Amazon agrees to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, which commits to AWS chips.
2023 Models
Inception, MBZUAI and Cerebras release the Jais Arabic model
Inception, MBZUAI and Cerebras released Jais, a 13-billion-parameter open Arabic-English language model trained on the Condor Galaxy 1 supercomputer.
2023 Policy
Pentagon unveils the Replicator initiative
The US Department of Defense launched Replicator, led by the Defense Innovation Unit, aiming to field thousands of uncrewed systems by August…
2023 Models
Llama 2 ships with commercial rights
Meta releases capable open weights businesses can legally deploy.
2023 Policy
Mata v. Avianca sanctions over ChatGPT-invented cases
A New York federal judge fined two lawyers and their firm $5,000 for filing a brief that cited court opinions which did…
2023 Models
TII releases Falcon 40B as an open model
Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute released Falcon 40B, a 40-billion-parameter language model trained on one trillion tokens, for research and commercial use.
2023 Applications
NVIDIA earnings reveal the datacentre boom
Guidance far above expectations exposes the scale of AI infrastructure spending.
2023 Policy
2023 Models
OpenAI releases GPT-4
A multimodal model posts large gains on professional and academic exams.
2023 Models
2023 Models
Meta releases LLaMA to researchers
Weights are shared under a research licence and leak publicly within a week.
2023 Applications
Microsoft puts ChatGPT inside Bing
Search results are paired with a conversational assistant.
2023 Policy
Pentagon reissues its autonomy in weapons directive
DoD Directive 3000.09 was updated, keeping the requirement for appropriate levels of human judgement over the use of force and senior review…
2023 Infrastructure
Microsoft extends its OpenAI compute deal
Microsoft announces a new multiyear OpenAI investment, widely reported at $10 billion but never officially confirmed.
2022 Applications
ChatGPT released
The interface, not the model, is what changed public understanding of what these systems could do.
2022 Robotics
Tesla opens FSD Beta to all North American buyers
Supervised autonomy scales to hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
2022 Policy
US restricts advanced AI chip exports to China
Export controls target high-end accelerators and the tools to make them.
2022 Policy
White House publishes an AI Bill of Rights blueprint
Five non-binding principles are set out for automated systems.
2022 Robotics
Tesla shows the first Optimus prototype
A rough humanoid robot walks on stage at Tesla's AI Day.
2022 Applications
Whisper commoditises speech recognition
OpenAI open-sources an accurate multilingual transcription model.
2022 Hardware
NVIDIA, Arm and Intel agree an FP8 format
The three companies publish a shared 8-bit floating-point specification for AI.
2022 Models
Stable Diffusion is released openly
Stability AI publishes weights that run on consumer graphics cards.
2022 Applications
India launches Bhashini, its language AI platform
Prime Minister Modi launched Digital India Bhashini at Digital India Week 2022 in Gandhinagar, a platform for AI-based translation and voice access…
2022 Hardware
SK hynix starts mass-producing HBM3 for NVIDIA
SK hynix began mass production of HBM3 memory, the first in the industry, and said it would supply it for NVIDIA's H100…
2022 Models
DALL-E 2 crosses into commercial quality
Image generation reaches a fidelity usable in real design work.
2022 Models
Google announces PaLM at 540 billion parameters
The largest dense model of its era demonstrates strong chain-of-thought reasoning.
2022 Research
Chinchilla proves compute-optimal scaling
DeepMind shows leading models are badly undertrained for their size.
2022 Hardware
NVIDIA’s Hopper adds a transformer engine
NVIDIA unveils the Hopper architecture and H100, with silicon dedicated to transformers.
2022 Infrastructure
Meta builds its own AI supercomputer
Meta unveils the AI Research SuperCluster, 6,080 GPUs with more planned.
2021 Policy
China publishes position paper on military AI
China's foreign ministry set out its position on regulating military uses of AI, saying relevant weapon systems should stay under human control.
2021 Policy
UNESCO adopts a global AI ethics standard
193 member states agree a shared recommendation on AI ethics.
2021 Robotics
Atlas completes a parkour course
Boston Dynamics' humanoid runs, jumps and vaults through an obstacle course.
2021 Models
AI21 Labs releases the Jurassic-1 language models
Tel Aviv's AI21 Labs opened AI21 Studio to developers with Jurassic-1 Jumbo, a 178-billion-parameter language model.
2021 Models
2021 Applications
GitHub Copilot enters preview
An AI pair programmer suggests code inline in the editor.
2021 Models
Naver unveils the HyperCLOVA Korean language model
Naver unveiled HyperCLOVA at its NAVER AI NOW conference, a 204-billion-parameter language model trained mostly on Korean-language data.
2021 Policy
The EU proposes the AI Act
The European Commission publishes a risk-tiered regulatory framework for AI.
2021 Models
DALL-E generates images from text
OpenAI shows a model that draws novel scenes from written descriptions.
2020 Policy
Google ousts Timnit Gebru
A dispute over the Stochastic Parrots paper ends the AI ethics co-lead's employment.
2020 Research
AlphaFold 2 wins CASP14
DeepMind predicts protein structures at roughly experimental accuracy.
2020 Robotics
Tesla ships Full Self-Driving Beta to owners
Unfinished autonomy software goes to selected customers on public roads.
2020 Robotics
Waymo opens driverless rides to the public
Phoenix riders can hail a vehicle with no human aboard.
2020 Hardware
Fugaku tops the TOP500 supercomputer list
RIKEN and Fujitsu's Fugaku ranked first on the TOP500 list at 415.53 petaflops, and also came first on the HPCG, HPL-AI and…
2020 Applications
OpenAI opens the GPT-3 API
Frontier model access is sold as a metered service in private beta.
2020 Models
GPT-3 shows few-shot learning at scale
A 175-billion-parameter model performs new tasks from examples in the prompt alone.
2020 Infrastructure
Microsoft builds a supercomputer for one customer
Microsoft reveals a top-five supercomputer on Azure, 10,000 GPUs, exclusively for OpenAI.
2020 Hardware
The A100 becomes the unit of AI compute
NVIDIA announces the Ampere A100, built for both training and inference.
2019 Hardware
Intel buys AI chipmaker Habana Labs for $2bn
Intel acquired Israeli AI accelerator maker Habana Labs for about $2bn.
2019 Research
Abu Dhabi announces MBZUAI, a graduate AI university
Abu Dhabi announced the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a graduate-level research university dedicated to AI.
2019 Hardware
TSMC ships EUV chips in high volume
TSMC announces its N7+ node is delivering EUV-lithography chips to customers at volume.
2019 Hardware
Cerebras builds a chip the size of a wafer
Cerebras reveals the Wafer Scale Engine, a single chip cut from an entire silicon wafer.
2019 Infrastructure
Microsoft invests $1bn in OpenAI
Microsoft commits $1 billion to OpenAI and becomes its exclusive cloud provider.
2019 Infrastructure
NVIDIA buys Mellanox for $6.9bn
NVIDIA agrees to acquire Mellanox, the InfiniBand networking company.
2019 Models
OpenAI withholds the full GPT-2 weights
A staged release holds back the largest model on misuse grounds.
2019 Policy
US issues its first national AI strategy
Executive Order 13859 directs federal AI research and standards work.
2018 Hardware
AWS builds its own inference chip
Amazon announces Inferentia, a custom chip built specifically for running trained models.
2018 Policy
German cabinet adopts its national AI strategy
The Federal Cabinet adopted Germany's AI strategy, Strategie Künstliche Intelligenz, setting aside around EUR 3 billion for AI from 2018 to 2025.
2018 Models
BERT makes pretraining the default
Google publishes a bidirectionally pretrained transformer for language understanding.
2018 Policy
NITI Aayog publishes India’s #AIforAll AI strategy
NITI Aayog released its discussion paper National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, branded #AIforAll, naming healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities and mobility as…
2018 Infrastructure
OpenAI measures a 300,000x rise in training compute
OpenAI measured a 300,000-fold rise in compute used by the largest training runs since 2012.
2018 Applications
Amazon Go opens the first checkout-free shop to the public
Amazon opens its Go shop in downtown Seattle, where cameras along the shelves track what shoppers pick up and bill their account…
2017 Policy
UAE names the world’s first Minister of State for AI
The UAE appointed Omar Sultan Al Olama, then 27, as Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in a cabinet reshuffle.
2017 Hardware
Apple ships a neural engine in every iPhone
Apple’s A11 Bionic debuts a dedicated Neural Engine for on-device machine learning.
2017 Applications
DeepL launches its neural machine translator in Cologne
Cologne-based DeepL, which grew out of Linguee, launched DeepL Translator, a free online neural machine translation service.
2017 Policy
China publishes its New Generation AI plan
Beijing sets out a national strategy to lead the world in AI by 2030.
2017 Research
Attention Is All You Need
Eight pages introducing the transformer, the architecture underneath essentially everything since.
2017 Research
AlphaGo beats world number one Ke Jie
DeepMind's system wins the Wuzhen match against the top-ranked human Go player.
2017 Hardware
NVIDIA’s Volta adds dedicated tensor cores
NVIDIA launches the V100 with tensor cores, silicon dedicated to matrix multiplication.
2017 Applications
Intel agrees to buy Mobileye for $15.3bn
Intel agreed to acquire Jerusalem-based Mobileye for $63.54 a share in cash, valuing it at about $15.3bn, with the combined self-driving unit…
2016 Applications
Google Translate goes neural
Phrase-based translation is replaced by an end-to-end neural system in production.
2016 Infrastructure
Berkeley Lab finds US data centre power growth flat
LBNL measured 2014 US datacentre use at 70 billion kWh, up 4% over four years.
2016 Hardware
Google reveals its custom TPU
Google announces the Tensor Processing Unit, a chip built for its own neural networks.
2016 Hardware
Tesla P100 brings HBM2 to the datacentre
NVIDIA reveals the Pascal-based Tesla P100, its first datacentre GPU built on HBM2.
2016 Models
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
DeepMind's system wins four of five games against the Go world champion.
2016 Applications
UPS ORION routing wins the Edelman Award
UPS's ORION route optimisation system won the 2016 Franz Edelman Award after saving more than $320 million by December 2015, according to…
2015 Models
2015 Applications
Google open-sources TensorFlow
Industrial-grade training infrastructure is released for anyone to use.
2014 Models
Generative adversarial networks introduced
Goodfellow pits a generator against a discriminator, each improving the other.
2013 Research
DQN learns Atari from pixels
DeepMind trains one network to play many games from raw screen images and score alone.
2013 Hardware
JEDEC standardises High Bandwidth Memory
JEDEC publishes JESD235, the first standard for stacked high bandwidth memory.
2013 Models
word2vec makes meaning computable
Google publishes a method for learning dense word embeddings at billion-word scale.
2012 Research
Deep networks take over speech recognition
Four labs jointly report deep neural networks beating existing speech recognisers.
2012 Models
AlexNet wins ImageNet
GPU training turns a dormant idea into an industry, cutting error rates dramatically overnight.
2012 Research
Dropout curbs overfitting
Hinton and colleagues publish dropout, randomly disabling units during training.
2012 Models
A Google network learns to spot cats unsupervised
A Google Brain network trained on ten million YouTube stills learns a cat detector without labels.
2012 Robotics
Amazon buys warehouse robot maker Kiva
Amazon agrees to buy Kiva Systems for about $775 million in cash.
2011 Applications
Apple unveils Siri with the iPhone 4S
Apple announces the iPhone 4S with Siri, a built-in voice-controlled assistant.
2011 Infrastructure
Facebook publishes its data centre hardware designs
Facebook released its server, rack and datacentre specifications and founded the Open Compute Project.
2011 Applications
Watson wins at Jeopardy!
IBM's question-answering system beats the game show's two strongest human champions.
2010 Infrastructure
Amazon rents GPUs by the hour
EC2 added Cluster GPU instances, putting two Tesla M2050s per node on the public cloud.
2010 Robotics
Google reveals its self-driving car project
Google discloses a fleet that has already driven over 140,000 miles on public roads.
2010 Infrastructure
Google signs a 20-year wind contract for its data centres
Google Energy contracted 114 megawatts of Iowa wind for twenty years at a fixed price.
2009 Research
ImageNet is released
A labelled dataset of more than fourteen million images is published at CVPR.
2009 Hardware
Stanford trains deep networks on GPUs
Stanford researchers show graphics chips train deep belief networks far faster than CPUs.
2008 Robotics
BigDog recovers its footing on ice
Boston Dynamics releases video of its DARPA-funded quadruped staying upright after being kicked on ice.
2007 Robotics
Six cars finish the DARPA Urban Challenge
Vehicles negotiate traffic, merging and right-of-way on a mock city course.
2007 Infrastructure
EPA tells Congress data centres use 1.5% of US power
A congressionally mandated EPA report put US data centre electricity use at 61 billion kWh.
2006 Hardware
NVIDIA launches CUDA for general GPU computing
NVIDIA unveils CUDA, letting developers program GPU cores directly in C.
2006 Infrastructure
Amazon rents server compute by the hour
Amazon opens EC2 in public beta, letting anyone rent virtual servers by the hour.
2006 Research
Hinton finds a way to train deep networks
Hinton, Osindero and Teh publish layer-wise pretraining for deep belief networks.
2006 Applications
Google Translate launches to the public
Google launches a free statistical machine-translation service built from bilingual web text.
2005 Robotics
Stanley wins the DARPA Grand Challenge
Stanford's vehicle completes 132 desert miles using learned perception rather than hand-coded rules.
2004 Robotics
No car finishes the DARPA Grand Challenge
The best entrant covers 7.4 of 142 desert miles before failing.
2003 Research
Amazon publishes how its item-to-item recommendations work
Amazon engineers Greg Linden, Brent Smith and Jeremy York describe item-to-item collaborative filtering, the method behind "customers who bought this also bought",…
2002 Robotics
iRobot launches the Roomba
iRobot launches the Roomba, the first robot vacuum sold to mass-market consumers.
2001 Research
Breiman formalises the random forest
Leo Breiman publishes Random Forests, combining many decision trees into one predictor.
2000 Robotics
Honda unveils the ASIMO humanoid robot
Honda unveils ASIMO, a humanoid able to walk naturally and climb stairs.
2000 Policy
Congress mandates unmanned combat vehicles
A defence law sets a goal that one-third of ground combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015.
2000 Robotics
The FDA clears the first robotic surgery system
The FDA clears Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci system for laparoscopic gallbladder and reflux surgery.
1999 Hardware
NVIDIA ships the GeForce 256 and calls it a GPU
NVIDIA releases the GeForce 256, marketing it as the first graphics processing unit.
1998 Research
MNIST becomes the field’s default benchmark
LeCun and colleagues release the MNIST digit dataset alongside LeNet-5 results.
1997 Research
LSTM solves long-range memory
Hochreiter and Schmidhuber introduce a recurrent cell with gated memory.
1997 Applications
Dragon ships continuous-speech dictation
Dragon Systems releases NaturallySpeaking, the first continuous-speech dictation software for PCs.
1997 Applications
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
IBM's chess machine wins a six-game match against the reigning world champion.
1997 Applications
USPS rolls out handwriting-reading mail sorters
The Postal Service begins installing handwriting recognition across mail-processing centres.
1995 Research
VaMP drives itself from Munich to Odense in Denmark
Ernst Dickmanns' team at the Bundeswehr University Munich drove the VaMP research car from Munich to Odense, steering and braking by camera…
1995 Policy
The EU adopts its first data protection directive
The EU adopts Directive 95/46/EC, governing automated processing of personal data.
1995 Research
The support vector machine is published
Cortes and Vapnik describe the support-vector network for classification.
1990 Research
IBM makes translation a statistical problem
Brown and colleagues publish a statistical, corpus-based approach to machine translation.
1989 Models
LeCun trains a network to read zip codes
Yann LeCun applies backpropagation to a convolutional network reading US postal codes.
1989 Applications
FICO launches the first universal credit score
Fair, Isaac and Company launches the FICO Score as a single standardised credit-risk formula.
1988 Research
Germany founds DFKI, its national AI research centre
The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) was founded as a non-profit public-private partnership, with its first sites in Kaiserslautern and…
1987 Policy
The Lisp machine market collapses
Specialised AI hardware is wiped out by cheaper general-purpose workstations.
1986 Research
Backpropagation popularised
Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams show how networks can assign credit across their own layers.
1985 Research
The Boltzmann machine trains hidden layers
Ackley, Hinton and Sejnowski publish a learning algorithm for stochastic multilayer networks.
1982 Research
Hopfield networks revive neural network research
John Hopfield describes a recurrent network storing memories as stable energy states.
1982 Policy
Japan launches its Fifth Generation Computer plan
Japan’s MITI launches a national project to build AI-oriented parallel computers.
1980 Applications
DEC puts an expert system into production
XCON configures VAX computer orders using hand-written rules.
1980 Models
The Neocognitron introduces convolution
Kunihiko Fukushima publishes a layered network using convolution and pooling for pattern recognition.
1976 Models
MYCIN diagnoses infections from rules
Shortliffe’s MYCIN uses hundreds of rules with confidence scores to recommend antibiotics.
1973 Policy
The Lighthill report triggers the first AI winter
A commissioned UK review concludes AI has failed to deliver on its promises.
1973 Research
Waseda University completes the WABOT-1 humanoid robot
Waseda University, under Professor Ichiro Kato, completed WABOT-1, a full-scale humanoid robot that could walk on two legs, grip objects and speak…
1972 Robotics
Shakey becomes the first robot that can reason
SRI completes Shakey, the first mobile robot able to perceive, plan and reason about its actions.
1971 Models
SHRDLU follows English commands
Terry Winograd’s SHRDLU parses English instructions to move blocks in a simulated world.
1969 Research
Perceptrons narrows the field
Minsky and Papert prove what single-layer networks cannot represent.
1966 Applications
ELIZA imitates a therapist
Weizenbaum's pattern-matching script holds a conversation in a few hundred lines of code.
1965 Hardware
Moore’s Law predicts transistor doubling
Gordon Moore predicts transistor counts on a chip will double roughly every year.
1965 Models
Dendral becomes the first expert system
Feigenbaum, Lederberg and Djerassi begin Dendral to infer chemical structures from spectrometry.
1961 Robotics
Unimate goes to work on GM’s assembly line
General Motors installs Unimate, the first programmable industrial robot, on a die-casting line.
1959 Models
Samuel’s checkers program learns from its own play
Arthur Samuel publishes a checkers program that improves by playing against itself.
1958 Research
The perceptron is unveiled
Rosenblatt demonstrates a machine that adjusts its own weights from examples.
1958 Research
McCarthy invents Lisp
John McCarthy designs Lisp, a language built on lists that treats code as data.
1956 Research
Dartmouth Workshop
The summer project that gave the field its name and its first decade of overpromising.
1950 Research
Turing proposes the imitation game
Computing Machinery and Intelligence replaces “can machines think?” with a behavioural test.
1950 Research
Shannon shows how a computer could play chess
Claude Shannon publishes search and evaluation strategies for computer chess.
1949 Research
Hebb proposes that neurons learn by firing together
Hebb’s Organization of Behavior proposes co-active neurons strengthen their connections.
1943 Research
McCulloch and Pitts model the artificial neuron
McCulloch and Pitts publish a logical model of neurons as binary threshold units.
1936 Research
Mahalanobis introduces his generalised distance measure
Indian statistician P.C. Mahalanobis published "On the generalised distance in statistics" in the Proceedings of the National Institute of Sciences of India.