The AI Timeline
Key moments. A clearer picture.
2026 Policy
The DOJ backs OpenAI in the New York Times case
The US government argues transformative public benefit outweighs publisher harm.
2026 Robotics
Waymo launches in Denver, San Diego and Tampa
The fleet passes 4,000 vehicles across fourteen US metros.
2026 Robotics
Unitree’s IPO values the humanoid maker near $66bn
Public markets price a Chinese humanoid firm above Western rivals.
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
The US export-controls a frontier model for the first time
Commerce restricts foreign access to a specific model's capabilities.
2026 Models
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 Applications
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 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 Applications
Agents reach production
Narrow, verifiable agent workflows begin shipping in enterprise software.
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 Models
2025 Robotics
Waymo begins driverless freeway rides
Speed and route limits that confined robotaxis to city centres are lifted.
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 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
AI models reach IMO gold-medal standard
General reasoning models solve olympiad problems without task-specific tooling.
2025 Models
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 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 Models
OpenAI releases o3 and o4-mini
Reasoning models gain the ability to use tools inside their chain of thought.
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 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 Research
DeepSeek releases R1 with open weights
A Chinese lab ships frontier reasoning trained by reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards.
2024 Applications
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 Models
OpenAI releases o1, its first reasoning model
The model spends extra computation thinking before it answers.
2024 Policy
2024 Models
Llama 3.1 405B reaches the frontier
Meta releases a downloadable model at roughly GPT-4 class.
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 Applications
NVIDIA announces Blackwell
A new accelerator generation promises order-of-magnitude training gains.
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 Models
Anthropic releases the Claude 3 family
Opus posts the first credible benchmark wins over GPT-4.
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.
2023 Models
Mixtral brings mixture-of-experts to open weights
Mistral ships a sparse model matching far larger dense ones.
2023 Models
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 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 Models
Llama 2 ships with commercial rights
Meta releases capable open weights businesses can legally deploy.
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.
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 Models
Stable Diffusion is released openly
Stability AI publishes weights that run on consumer graphics cards.
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.
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
2021 Applications
GitHub Copilot enters preview
An AI pair programmer suggests code inline in the editor.
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 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.
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 Models
BERT makes pretraining the default
Google publishes a bidirectionally pretrained transformer for language understanding.
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.