The AI Timeline

Key moments. A clearer picture.

Oct 1
2026
Policy
Policy

arXiv rate-limits authors over AI-written papers

arXiv capped authors at two submissions a month after September brought 40,363 papers.

Sep 29
2026
Policy
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.

Sep 28
2026
Policy
Policy

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.

Sep 21
2026
Infrastructure
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.

Sep 17
2026
Policy
Policy

Anthropic lets vetted labs past its biology safeguards

Anthropic gives verified life science teams access to biology work its models otherwise refuse.

Sep 16
2026
Applications
Applications

OpenAI puts conversational ads inside ChatGPT

A US test lets users who click an ad talk to a business-sponsored agent first.

Sep 10
2026
Applications
Applications

OpenAI opens its agent harness as a managed API

The Codex harness behind ChatGPT and Codex enters public beta as the Agents API.

Sep 10
2026
Policy
Policy

Anthropic names the misuse operations it disrupted

A threat report details state-linked and criminal abuse of Claude across seven categories of harm.

Sep 8
2026
Research
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.

Sep 5
2026
Policy
Policy

The DOJ backs OpenAI in the New York Times case

The US government argues transformative public benefit outweighs publisher harm.

Sep 1
2026
Robotics
Robotics

Waymo launches in Denver, San Diego and Tampa

The fleet passes 4,000 vehicles across fourteen US metros.

Aug 19
2026
Robotics
Robotics

Unitree’s IPO values the humanoid maker near $66bn

Public markets price a Chinese humanoid firm above Western rivals.

Aug 13
2026
Models
Models

DeepSeek ships its V4-Pro agentic flagship

The lab that triggered the price war releases a premium-priced model.

Aug 10
2026
Robotics
Robotics

Zoox charges for rides in a vehicle with no steering wheel

Paid service begins in Las Vegas under a federal exemption.

Jul 30
2026
Robotics
Robotics

Gemini Robotics 2 adds whole-body control

One model handles locomotion, fine manipulation and robot-to-robot collaboration.

Jul 15
2026
Hardware
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.

Jun 12
2026
Policy
Policy

The US export-controls a frontier model for the first time

Commerce restricts foreign access to a specific model's capabilities.

Jun 9
2026
Models
Models

Anthropic previews models with cyber capability claims

Vulnerability discovery across major operating systems and browsers is demonstrated.

Jun 1
2026
Policy
Policy

US chip controls extend to Chinese firms abroad

Ownership, not location, becomes the test for GPU access.

May 31
2026
Hardware
Hardware

NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin reaches full production

A new rack generation targets agent throughput rather than raw training.

May 6
2026
Policy
Policy

The EU delays high-risk AI Act obligations

Annex III duties are pushed back to December 2027.

Feb 27
2026
Robotics
Robotics

Apollo Go reports 300,000 weekly robotaxi rides

Baidu discloses peak volumes and expansion into Korea and the Gulf.

Feb 18
2026
Policy
Policy

92 countries adopt the New Delhi AI Declaration

An India-hosted summit backs a development-first agenda.

Feb 5
2026
Models
Models

Rival agentic coding models ship the same day

Anthropic and OpenAI release competing coding flagships within hours.

Jan 15
2026
Applications
Applications

Agents reach production

Narrow, verifiable agent workflows begin shipping in enterprise software.

Dec 30
2025
Hardware
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.

Dec 11
2025
Policy
Policy

A US executive order seeks to preempt state AI laws

Federal authority is asserted over state-level AI statutes.

Dec 9
2025
Applications
Applications

MCP is donated to the Linux Foundation

The agent-tool standard moves to neutral governance.

Nov 18
2025
Models
Models

Google launches Gemini 3

A clear benchmark lead ships same-day into Search.

Nov 12
2025
Robotics
Robotics

Waymo begins driverless freeway rides

Speed and route limits that confined robotaxis to city centres are lifted.

Oct 29
2025
Robotics
Robotics

1X opens preorders for a $20,000 home humanoid

Neo is sold to consumers, with chores partly completed by remote human operators.

Oct 9
2025
Robotics
Robotics

Figure unveils a mass-producible humanoid

Figure 03 is engineered for factory-scale manufacture rather than demonstration.

Oct 6
2025
Applications
Applications

AMD and OpenAI sign a 6-gigawatt partnership

A second supplier is brought into frontier training at scale.

Sep 29
2025
Policy
Policy

California enacts SB 53

Frontier labs must publish safety frameworks and report incidents.

Sep 29
2025
Hardware
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.

Sep 22
2025
Applications
Applications

NVIDIA commits up to $100bn to OpenAI

A chipmaker takes an equity position in its largest customer.

Sep 18
2025
Research
Research

DeepSeek’s R1 passes peer review in Nature

A frontier model's training method clears formal scientific review.

Sep 5
2025
Policy
Policy

Anthropic settles an authors’ copyright suit for $1.5bn

The largest US copyright settlement on record resolves claims over pirated books.

Aug 7
2025
Models
Models

GPT-5 launches with automatic model routing

A router picks reasoning effort on the user's behalf.

Aug 2
2025
Policy
Policy

EU AI Act rules for general-purpose models apply

Transparency and copyright duties land on foundation-model providers.

Jul 19
2025
Research
Research

AI models reach IMO gold-medal standard

General reasoning models solve olympiad problems without task-specific tooling.

Jul 9
2025
Models
Models

xAI releases Grok 4

A frontier claim arrives with a $300-a-month multi-agent tier.

Jun 23
2025
Policy
Policy

A US court finds book training can be fair use

Lawful acquisition is protected; pirated corpora are not.

Jun 22
2025
Robotics
Robotics

Tesla begins paid robotaxi rides in Austin

Camera-only autonomy carries paying passengers with onboard safety monitors.

May 16
2025
Applications
Applications

OpenAI launches a cloud coding agent

Codex runs delegated software tasks in parallel rather than completing lines.

May 13
2025
Policy
Policy

US rescinds the AI diffusion export rule

Tiered global GPU quotas are replaced with case-by-case bilateral deals.

Apr 16
2025
Models
Models

OpenAI releases o3 and o4-mini

Reasoning models gain the ability to use tools inside their chain of thought.

Apr 16
2025
Hardware
Hardware

JEDEC publishes the HBM4 memory standard

JEDEC released HBM4, doubling the stack interface to 2,048 bits and channels to 32.

Apr 9
2025
Applications
Applications

Google launches the Agent2Agent protocol

A standard lets agents from different vendors delegate work to each other.

Apr 5
2025
Models
Models

Meta releases Llama 4

Scout and Maverick ship amid benchmark controversy and a missing flagship.

Mar 28
2025
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

CoreWeave takes GPU rental public

CoreWeave lists on Nasdaq in the largest US tech IPO since 2021.

Mar 12
2025
Robotics
Robotics

Gemini Robotics puts frontier models in robot control

A multimodal model is adapted to drive physical manipulation.

Feb 24
2025
Applications
Applications

Claude Code ships alongside hybrid reasoning

Anthropic pairs a reasoning model with a terminal-based coding agent.

Jan 21
2025
Applications
Applications

Stargate commits $500bn to AI compute

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announce a multi-site datacentre venture.

Jan 21
2025
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Stargate pledges $500bn for AI infrastructure

OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announce Stargate, with about $100 billion committed near-term.

Jan 20
2025
Research
Research

DeepSeek releases R1 with open weights

A Chinese lab ships frontier reasoning trained by reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards.

Dec 9
2024
Applications
Applications

Sora ships to ChatGPT subscribers

Generative video becomes a consumer product.

Nov 1
2024
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Regulators block a direct nuclear supply deal

FERC rejects the amended agreement letting Amazon draw power straight from Susquehanna.

Oct 9
2024
Research
Research

AlphaFold’s creators win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Baker, Hassabis and Jumper are recognised for protein structure work.

Oct 8
2024
Research
Research

Hopfield and Hinton win the Nobel Prize in Physics

Neural network foundations are recognised by science's highest honour.

Sep 20
2024
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

A shuttered nuclear plant reopens for AI

Constellation signs a 20-year deal to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 to supply Microsoft.

Sep 12
2024
Models
Models

OpenAI releases o1, its first reasoning model

The model spends extra computation thinking before it answers.

Sep 2
2024
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

xAI stands up a 100,000-GPU cluster

xAI says its Colossus cluster is running 100,000 H100s, built in 122 days.

Aug 20
2024
Robotics
Robotics

Waymo reaches 100,000 paid rides a week

Volume doubles in six months.

Aug 1
2024
Policy
Policy

The EU AI Act enters into force

The compliance clock starts for firms selling into Europe.

Jul 23
2024
Models
Models

Llama 3.1 405B reaches the frontier

Meta releases a downloadable model at roughly GPT-4 class.

Jun 25
2024
Robotics
Robotics

Waymo opens San Francisco to everyone

Driverless service goes fully public in a dense US city.

May 21
2024
Policy
Policy

Sixteen firms sign frontier safety commitments

The Seoul summit turns Bletchley principles into company pledges.

May 13
2024
Models
Models

GPT-4o makes frontier multimodality free

Voice and vision at frontier quality open to all users at no cost.

May 8
2024
Research
Research

AlphaFold 3 extends beyond proteins

Structure prediction covers DNA, RNA and drug-like molecules.

Mar 18
2024
Applications
Applications

NVIDIA announces Blackwell

A new accelerator generation promises order-of-magnitude training gains.

Mar 18
2024
Hardware
Hardware

NVIDIA unveils Blackwell

NVIDIA announces the Blackwell architecture and GB200 at its developer conference.

Mar 13
2024
Policy
Policy

The European Parliament adopts the AI Act

The world's first comprehensive AI law passes.

Mar 12
2024
Applications
Applications

Devin is unveiled as an autonomous software engineer

An agent plans and executes entire coding tasks rather than completing lines.

Mar 4
2024
Models
Models

Anthropic releases the Claude 3 family

Opus posts the first credible benchmark wins over GPT-4.

Mar 4
2024
Infrastructure
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.

Feb 29
2024
Robotics
Robotics

Figure raises $675M and partners with OpenAI

Frontier language models are pointed at humanoid robot control.

Feb 15
2024
Models
Models

OpenAI unveils Sora

Text prompts generate near-photorealistic minute-long video.

Feb 15
2024
Models
Models

Gemini 1.5 Pro ships a million-token context

Whole codebases and books fit in a single prompt.

Jan 18
2024
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Meta discloses a 350,000-GPU stockpile

Zuckerberg says Meta will hold about 350,000 NVIDIA H100s by the end of 2024.

Dec 11
2023
Models
Models

Mixtral brings mixture-of-experts to open weights

Mistral ships a sparse model matching far larger dense ones.

Dec 6
2023
Models
Models

Google announces Gemini

A natively multimodal model family is unveiled across three sizes.

Dec 6
2023
Hardware
Hardware

AMD’s MI300X challenges the H100

AMD launches the Instinct MI300X, positioned directly against NVIDIA’s H100.

Nov 17
2023
Applications
Applications

OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman

Five days of turmoil end with his return and a reconstituted board.

Nov 1
2023
Policy
Policy

The Bletchley Declaration is agreed

28 countries and the EU sign a joint statement on frontier AI risk.

Oct 30
2023
Policy
Policy

Biden signs an executive order on AI

Compute-threshold reporting duties are imposed on frontier developers.

Oct 24
2023
Robotics
Robotics

California suspends Cruise’s robotaxi permits

Regulators act after the company withholds footage of a pedestrian injury.

Sep 27
2023
Models
Models

Mistral 7B ships under Apache 2.0

A European startup releases a small model beating far larger ones.

Sep 25
2023
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Amazon invests up to $4bn in Anthropic

Amazon agrees to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, which commits to AWS chips.

Jul 18
2023
Models
Models

Llama 2 ships with commercial rights

Meta releases capable open weights businesses can legally deploy.

May 24
2023
Applications
Applications

NVIDIA earnings reveal the datacentre boom

Guidance far above expectations exposes the scale of AI infrastructure spending.

Mar 22
2023
Policy
Policy

The pause letter goes public

Thousands sign a call to halt training of systems beyond GPT-4.

Mar 14
2023
Models
Models

OpenAI releases GPT-4

A multimodal model posts large gains on professional and academic exams.

Mar 14
2023
Models
Models

Anthropic launches Claude

A second safety-focused lab ships a commercial frontier assistant.

Feb 24
2023
Models
Models

Meta releases LLaMA to researchers

Weights are shared under a research licence and leak publicly within a week.

Feb 7
2023
Applications
Applications

Microsoft puts ChatGPT inside Bing

Search results are paired with a conversational assistant.

Jan 23
2023
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Microsoft extends its OpenAI compute deal

Microsoft announces a new multiyear OpenAI investment, widely reported at $10 billion but never officially confirmed.

Nov 30
2022
Applications
Applications

ChatGPT released

The interface, not the model, is what changed public understanding of what these systems could do.

Nov 24
2022
Robotics
Robotics

Tesla opens FSD Beta to all North American buyers

Supervised autonomy scales to hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Oct 7
2022
Policy
Policy

US restricts advanced AI chip exports to China

Export controls target high-end accelerators and the tools to make them.

Oct 4
2022
Policy
Policy

White House publishes an AI Bill of Rights blueprint

Five non-binding principles are set out for automated systems.

Sep 30
2022
Robotics
Robotics

Tesla shows the first Optimus prototype

A rough humanoid robot walks on stage at Tesla's AI Day.

Sep 21
2022
Applications
Applications

Whisper commoditises speech recognition

OpenAI open-sources an accurate multilingual transcription model.

Sep 14
2022
Hardware
Hardware

NVIDIA, Arm and Intel agree an FP8 format

The three companies publish a shared 8-bit floating-point specification for AI.

Aug 22
2022
Models
Models

Stable Diffusion is released openly

Stability AI publishes weights that run on consumer graphics cards.

Apr 6
2022
Models
Models

DALL-E 2 crosses into commercial quality

Image generation reaches a fidelity usable in real design work.

Apr 4
2022
Models
Models

Google announces PaLM at 540 billion parameters

The largest dense model of its era demonstrates strong chain-of-thought reasoning.

Mar 29
2022
Research
Research

Chinchilla proves compute-optimal scaling

DeepMind shows leading models are badly undertrained for their size.

Mar 22
2022
Hardware
Hardware

NVIDIA’s Hopper adds a transformer engine

NVIDIA unveils the Hopper architecture and H100, with silicon dedicated to transformers.

Jan 24
2022
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Meta builds its own AI supercomputer

Meta unveils the AI Research SuperCluster, 6,080 GPUs with more planned.

Nov 23
2021
Policy
Policy

UNESCO adopts a global AI ethics standard

193 member states agree a shared recommendation on AI ethics.

Aug 17
2021
Robotics
Robotics

Atlas completes a parkour course

Boston Dynamics' humanoid runs, jumps and vaults through an obstacle course.

Aug 10
2021
Models
Models

OpenAI releases Codex via API

A model specialised for programming is opened to developers.

Jun 29
2021
Applications
Applications

GitHub Copilot enters preview

An AI pair programmer suggests code inline in the editor.

Apr 21
2021
Policy
Policy

The EU proposes the AI Act

The European Commission publishes a risk-tiered regulatory framework for AI.

Jan 5
2021
Models
Models

DALL-E generates images from text

OpenAI shows a model that draws novel scenes from written descriptions.

Dec 2
2020
Policy
Policy

Google ousts Timnit Gebru

A dispute over the Stochastic Parrots paper ends the AI ethics co-lead's employment.

Nov 30
2020
Research
Research

AlphaFold 2 wins CASP14

DeepMind predicts protein structures at roughly experimental accuracy.

Oct 20
2020
Robotics
Robotics

Tesla ships Full Self-Driving Beta to owners

Unfinished autonomy software goes to selected customers on public roads.

Oct 8
2020
Robotics
Robotics

Waymo opens driverless rides to the public

Phoenix riders can hail a vehicle with no human aboard.

Jun 11
2020
Applications
Applications

OpenAI opens the GPT-3 API

Frontier model access is sold as a metered service in private beta.

May 28
2020
Models
Models

GPT-3 shows few-shot learning at scale

A 175-billion-parameter model performs new tasks from examples in the prompt alone.

May 19
2020
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Microsoft builds a supercomputer for one customer

Microsoft reveals a top-five supercomputer on Azure, 10,000 GPUs, exclusively for OpenAI.

May 14
2020
Hardware
Hardware

The A100 becomes the unit of AI compute

NVIDIA announces the Ampere A100, built for both training and inference.

Oct 7
2019
Hardware
Hardware

TSMC ships EUV chips in high volume

TSMC announces its N7+ node is delivering EUV-lithography chips to customers at volume.

Aug 19
2019
Hardware
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.

Jul 22
2019
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Microsoft invests $1bn in OpenAI

Microsoft commits $1 billion to OpenAI and becomes its exclusive cloud provider.

Mar 11
2019
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

NVIDIA buys Mellanox for $6.9bn

NVIDIA agrees to acquire Mellanox, the InfiniBand networking company.

Feb 14
2019
Models
Models

OpenAI withholds the full GPT-2 weights

A staged release holds back the largest model on misuse grounds.

Feb 11
2019
Policy
Policy

US issues its first national AI strategy

Executive Order 13859 directs federal AI research and standards work.

Nov 28
2018
Hardware
Hardware

AWS builds its own inference chip

Amazon announces Inferentia, a custom chip built specifically for running trained models.

Oct 11
2018
Models
Models

BERT makes pretraining the default

Google publishes a bidirectionally pretrained transformer for language understanding.

May 16
2018
Infrastructure
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.

Sep 12
2017
Hardware
Hardware

Apple ships a neural engine in every iPhone

Apple’s A11 Bionic debuts a dedicated Neural Engine for on-device machine learning.

Jul 20
2017
Policy
Policy

China publishes its New Generation AI plan

Beijing sets out a national strategy to lead the world in AI by 2030.

Jun 12
2017
Research
Research

Attention Is All You Need

Eight pages introducing the transformer, the architecture underneath essentially everything since.

May 25
2017
Research
Research

AlphaGo beats world number one Ke Jie

DeepMind's system wins the Wuzhen match against the top-ranked human Go player.

May 10
2017
Hardware
Hardware

NVIDIA’s Volta adds dedicated tensor cores

NVIDIA launches the V100 with tensor cores, silicon dedicated to matrix multiplication.

Sep 27
2016
Applications
Applications

Google Translate goes neural

Phrase-based translation is replaced by an end-to-end neural system in production.

Jun 1
2016
Infrastructure
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.

May 19
2016
Hardware
Hardware

Google reveals its custom TPU

Google announces the Tensor Processing Unit, a chip built for its own neural networks.

Apr 5
2016
Hardware
Hardware

Tesla P100 brings HBM2 to the datacentre

NVIDIA reveals the Pascal-based Tesla P100, its first datacentre GPU built on HBM2.

Mar 15
2016
Models
Models

AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol

DeepMind's system wins four of five games against the Go world champion.

Dec 10
2015
Models
Models

ResNet solves depth

Residual connections let networks go far deeper without degrading.

Nov 9
2015
Applications
Applications

Google open-sources TensorFlow

Industrial-grade training infrastructure is released for anyone to use.

Jun 10
2014
Models
Models

Generative adversarial networks introduced

Goodfellow pits a generator against a discriminator, each improving the other.

Dec 19
2013
Research
Research

DQN learns Atari from pixels

DeepMind trains one network to play many games from raw screen images and score alone.

Oct 1
2013
Hardware
Hardware

JEDEC standardises High Bandwidth Memory

JEDEC publishes JESD235, the first standard for stacked high bandwidth memory.

Jan 16
2013
Models
Models

word2vec makes meaning computable

Google publishes a method for learning dense word embeddings at billion-word scale.

Nov 1
2012
Research
Research

Deep networks take over speech recognition

Four labs jointly report deep neural networks beating existing speech recognisers.

Sep 30
2012
Models
Models

AlexNet wins ImageNet

GPU training turns a dormant idea into an industry, cutting error rates dramatically overnight.

Jul 3
2012
Research
Research

Dropout curbs overfitting

Hinton and colleagues publish dropout, randomly disabling units during training.

Jun 26
2012
Models
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.

Mar 19
2012
Robotics
Robotics

Amazon buys warehouse robot maker Kiva

Amazon agrees to buy Kiva Systems for about $775 million in cash.

Oct 4
2011
Applications
Applications

Apple unveils Siri with the iPhone 4S

Apple announces the iPhone 4S with Siri, a built-in voice-controlled assistant.

Apr 7
2011
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Facebook publishes its data centre hardware designs

Facebook released its server, rack and datacentre specifications and founded the Open Compute Project.

Feb 16
2011
Applications
Applications

Watson wins at Jeopardy!

IBM's question-answering system beats the game show's two strongest human champions.

Nov 15
2010
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Amazon rents GPUs by the hour

EC2 added Cluster GPU instances, putting two Tesla M2050s per node on the public cloud.

Oct 9
2010
Robotics
Robotics

Google reveals its self-driving car project

Google discloses a fleet that has already driven over 140,000 miles on public roads.

Jul 20
2010
Infrastructure
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.

Jun 20
2009
Research
Research

ImageNet is released

A labelled dataset of more than fourteen million images is published at CVPR.

Jun 14
2009
Hardware
Hardware

Stanford trains deep networks on GPUs

Stanford researchers show graphics chips train deep belief networks far faster than CPUs.

Mar 17
2008
Robotics
Robotics

BigDog recovers its footing on ice

Boston Dynamics releases video of its DARPA-funded quadruped staying upright after being kicked on ice.

Nov 3
2007
Robotics
Robotics

Six cars finish the DARPA Urban Challenge

Vehicles negotiate traffic, merging and right-of-way on a mock city course.

Aug 2
2007
Infrastructure
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.

Nov 16
2006
Hardware
Hardware

NVIDIA launches CUDA for general GPU computing

NVIDIA unveils CUDA, letting developers program GPU cores directly in C.

Aug 25
2006
Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Amazon rents server compute by the hour

Amazon opens EC2 in public beta, letting anyone rent virtual servers by the hour.

Jul 1
2006
Research
Research

Hinton finds a way to train deep networks

Hinton, Osindero and Teh publish layer-wise pretraining for deep belief networks.

Apr 28
2006
Applications
Applications

Google Translate launches to the public

Google launches a free statistical machine-translation service built from bilingual web text.

Oct 8
2005
Robotics
Robotics

Stanley wins the DARPA Grand Challenge

Stanford's vehicle completes 132 desert miles using learned perception rather than hand-coded rules.

Mar 13
2004
Robotics
Robotics

No car finishes the DARPA Grand Challenge

The best entrant covers 7.4 of 142 desert miles before failing.

Sep 18
2002
Robotics
Robotics

iRobot launches the Roomba

iRobot launches the Roomba, the first robot vacuum sold to mass-market consumers.

Oct 1
2001
Research
Research

Breiman formalises the random forest

Leo Breiman publishes Random Forests, combining many decision trees into one predictor.

Nov 20
2000
Robotics
Robotics

Honda unveils the ASIMO humanoid robot

Honda unveils ASIMO, a humanoid able to walk naturally and climb stairs.

Oct 30
2000
Policy
Policy

Congress mandates unmanned combat vehicles

A defence law sets a goal that one-third of ground combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015.

Jul 17
2000
Robotics
Robotics

The FDA clears the first robotic surgery system

The FDA clears Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci system for laparoscopic gallbladder and reflux surgery.

Oct 11
1999
Hardware
Hardware

NVIDIA ships the GeForce 256 and calls it a GPU

NVIDIA releases the GeForce 256, marketing it as the first graphics processing unit.

Nov 1
1998
Research
Research

MNIST becomes the field’s default benchmark

LeCun and colleagues release the MNIST digit dataset alongside LeNet-5 results.

Nov 1
1997
Research
Research

LSTM solves long-range memory

Hochreiter and Schmidhuber introduce a recurrent cell with gated memory.

Jun 1
1997
Applications
Applications

Dragon ships continuous-speech dictation

Dragon Systems releases NaturallySpeaking, the first continuous-speech dictation software for PCs.

May 11
1997
Applications
Applications

Deep Blue beats Kasparov

IBM's chess machine wins a six-game match against the reigning world champion.

Jan 24
1997
Applications
Applications

USPS rolls out handwriting-reading mail sorters

The Postal Service begins installing handwriting recognition across mail-processing centres.

Oct 24
1995
Policy
Policy

The EU adopts its first data protection directive

The EU adopts Directive 95/46/EC, governing automated processing of personal data.

Sep 1
1995
Research
Research

The support vector machine is published

Cortes and Vapnik describe the support-vector network for classification.

Jun 1
1990
Research
Research

IBM makes translation a statistical problem

Brown and colleagues publish a statistical, corpus-based approach to machine translation.

Dec 1
1989
Models
Models

LeCun trains a network to read zip codes

Yann LeCun applies backpropagation to a convolutional network reading US postal codes.

Jan 1
1989
Applications
Applications

FICO launches the first universal credit score

Fair, Isaac and Company launches the FICO Score as a single standardised credit-risk formula.

Jan 1
1987
Policy
Policy

The Lisp machine market collapses

Specialised AI hardware is wiped out by cheaper general-purpose workstations.

Oct 9
1986
Research
Research

Backpropagation popularised

Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams show how networks can assign credit across their own layers.

Jan 1
1985
Research
Research

The Boltzmann machine trains hidden layers

Ackley, Hinton and Sejnowski publish a learning algorithm for stochastic multilayer networks.

Apr 1
1982
Research
Research

Hopfield networks revive neural network research

John Hopfield describes a recurrent network storing memories as stable energy states.

Jan 1
1982
Policy
Policy

Japan launches its Fifth Generation Computer plan

Japan’s MITI launches a national project to build AI-oriented parallel computers.

Jan 1
1980
Applications
Applications

DEC puts an expert system into production

XCON configures VAX computer orders using hand-written rules.

Jan 1
1980
Models
Models

The Neocognitron introduces convolution

Kunihiko Fukushima publishes a layered network using convolution and pooling for pattern recognition.

Jan 1
1976
Models
Models

MYCIN diagnoses infections from rules

Shortliffe’s MYCIN uses hundreds of rules with confidence scores to recommend antibiotics.

May 9
1973
Policy
Policy

The Lighthill report triggers the first AI winter

A commissioned UK review concludes AI has failed to deliver on its promises.

Jan 1
1972
Robotics
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.

Jan 1
1971
Models
Models

SHRDLU follows English commands

Terry Winograd’s SHRDLU parses English instructions to move blocks in a simulated world.

Jan 1
1969
Research
Research

Perceptrons narrows the field

Minsky and Papert prove what single-layer networks cannot represent.

Jan 1
1966
Applications
Applications

ELIZA imitates a therapist

Weizenbaum's pattern-matching script holds a conversation in a few hundred lines of code.

Apr 19
1965
Hardware
Hardware

Moore’s Law predicts transistor doubling

Gordon Moore predicts transistor counts on a chip will double roughly every year.

Jan 1
1965
Models
Models

Dendral becomes the first expert system

Feigenbaum, Lederberg and Djerassi begin Dendral to infer chemical structures from spectrometry.

Jan 1
1961
Robotics
Robotics

Unimate goes to work on GM’s assembly line

General Motors installs Unimate, the first programmable industrial robot, on a die-casting line.

Jul 1
1959
Models
Models

Samuel’s checkers program learns from its own play

Arthur Samuel publishes a checkers program that improves by playing against itself.

Jul 8
1958
Research
Research

The perceptron is unveiled

Rosenblatt demonstrates a machine that adjusts its own weights from examples.

Jan 1
1958
Research
Research

McCarthy invents Lisp

John McCarthy designs Lisp, a language built on lists that treats code as data.

Jun 18
1956
Research
Research

Dartmouth Workshop

The summer project that gave the field its name and its first decade of overpromising.

Oct 1
1950
Research
Research

Turing proposes the imitation game

Computing Machinery and Intelligence replaces “can machines think?” with a behavioural test.

Mar 1
1950
Research
Research

Shannon shows how a computer could play chess

Claude Shannon publishes search and evaluation strategies for computer chess.

Jan 1
1949
Research
Research

Hebb proposes that neurons learn by firing together

Hebb’s Organization of Behavior proposes co-active neurons strengthen their connections.

Jan 1
1943
Research
Research

McCulloch and Pitts model the artificial neuron

McCulloch and Pitts publish a logical model of neurons as binary threshold units.