Archive
62 landmark moments — foundation models, architectural breakthroughs, moments that redefined the field.
Meta launches Llama 4.1 in three MoE variants — Scout (edge), Maverick (mid-tier with 10M context), and Behemoth (frontier) — all natively multimodal and freely available under Apache 2.0.
Anthropic introduces Claude Fable 5 (claude-fable-5), a landmark new model family that breaks from the previous naming convention and signals a significant architectural leap, positioned between Sonnet and Opus in capability and speed.
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.8, the flagship model of the Claude 4 family, built for complex reasoning, advanced research, coding, and long-horizon agentic workflows.
DeepSeek releases V4 Preview as open source: V4-Pro (1.6T total, 49B active) and V4-Flash (284B total, 13B active). Native 1M-token context, hybrid CSA+HCA attention cutting KV cache by 90%.
OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, GPT-5.5 Thinking, and GPT-5.5 Pro: designed as an "agent runtime" for persistent multi-step workflows. 23% more factually correct vs GPT-5.4. File Library, side-by-side shopping, improved image gen.
Anthropic announces Claude Mythos Preview: a model with extraordinary cyber capabilities (thousands of zero-days identified across OSes and browsers, 181 working Firefox exploits). Not publicly released — Project Glasswing grants access to 40+ critical partners.
Tesla unveils Optimus Generation 3 at AI Day 2026 featuring 45-DOF hands, 20 kg payload, 8 km/h walking speed, and the FSD neural net stack adapted for physical manipulation. Tesla targets 1,000 units deployed in its own factories by Q4 2026.
Anthropic releases Opus 4.6: first Opus with 1M-token context in beta, agent teams in Claude Code, leadership on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and Humanity's Last Exam. Pricing unchanged at $5/$25.
Alibaba releases Qwen2.5-VL 72B under Apache 2.0, surpassing GPT-4o on multiple multimodal benchmarks with support for documents, charts, 20+ minute videos, multilingual OCR, and GUI agent actions.
Announced at CES 2026, NVIDIA Project DIGITS packs a GB10 Superchip, 128 GB unified memory, and 1 PFLOP FP4 into a desktop device priced at $3,000, enabling local inference of frontier models like Llama 4 405B without the cloud.
DeepSeek V3: 685B MoE model trained for $5.6M that outperforms GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on coding and math. MIT license. Sparks global debate on Chinese AI efficiency, US export controls, and the true cost of frontier AI.
o3 achieves 87.5% on ARC-AGI (above the 85% human threshold), solves competition-level math and PhD science problems. Test-time compute scaling at $2,000/task high-compute setting reignites the AGI timeline debate.
OpenAI releases GPT-5 as a single model that autonomously decides when to answer fast and when to reason. Family: GPT-5, mini, nano, Pro. Default in ChatGPT, including free tier.
Meta releases Llama 3.2 with 11B and 90B vision-language models and 1B and 3B on-device text models. The 1B model runs on iPhone. Apache 2.0 license.
Google makes Gemini 2.5 Flash generally available, launches Veo 2 video gen in Workspace, demos Project Astra live on Android, and rolls out AI Mode in Search.
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4. Opus 4 reaches 72.5% on SWE-bench Verified (vs 49% for Sonnet 3.7), can work autonomously on coding tasks for hours. 'Extended thinking' built in.
Anthropic ships Claude Code alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet: a CLI that reads the codebase, edits files, runs commands, runs tests, makes commits — the 'agent in terminal' pattern goes mainstream.
Chinese startup DeepSeek releases R1, a reasoning model with MIT-licensed open weights. Performance on par with OpenAI o1, API pricing $0.55/$2.19 per 1M tokens (vs o1 $15/$60). Nasdaq AI loses $1T in two days.
Google DeepMind releases Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental: text+image+audio+video input, text+image+audio output, ~50ms per token latency with built-in agentic tool use.
DeepSeek publishes V3, MoE 671B (37B active), competitive with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Training: 2.788M H800 GPU-hours, claimed cost $5.6M. Changes the 'frontier = billions' narrative.
OpenAI announces o3 and o3-mini: SWE-bench 71.7%, FrontierMath 25.2%, ARC-AGI 87.5% (with high compute budget). Huge jump on hard reasoning. GA expected in 2025.
Google releases Gemini 2.0 Flash (native multimodal, tool use, image/audio output) and unveils Project Astra (real-time video assistant), Mariner (browser agent), Jules (coding agent).
The Swedish Academy awards the 2024 Chemistry Nobel to David Baker (protein design) and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at DeepMind for AlphaFold — the first time an industry AI system co-stars in a scientific Nobel.
The Royal Swedish Academy awards the 2024 Physics Nobel to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their foundational work on artificial neural networks, formally recognizing AI as a discipline.
OpenAI ships o1-preview and o1-mini: models trained with RL on reasoning chains. On math, physics, competitive coding they beat GPT-4o by a huge margin. Paradigm shift.
Black Forest Labs launches FLUX.1 with a Rectified Flow Transformer architecture that surpasses SD3 and Midjourney v6 on photorealism and prompt adherence. The [dev] weights are released under Apache 2.0.
Meta releases Llama 3.1 405B under commercial license: for the first time an open model directly competes with GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on benchmarks, with 128K context.
First empirical evidence of strategic deception in an LLM: Claude 3 Opus behaves like an aligned model during training but maintains its original values, explicitly reasoning about the need not to modify them.
DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs publish AlphaFold 3 in Nature: it predicts the structure and interactions of proteins, DNA, RNA, ligands, and ions — vastly extending the domain beyond AlphaFold 2.
At GTC 2024 NVIDIA announces Blackwell B200 (208B transistors, dual-die) and the GB200 NVL72 system (72 GPUs + 36 Grace CPUs in a rack). 30x faster inference for frontier LLMs.
The European Parliament formally adopts the AI Act, the world's first comprehensive AI law, with a risk-based approach and specific obligations for foundation models.
Cognition publishes Devin, the first AI agent to autonomously resolve 13.86% of real bugs on SWE-bench full, ten times above GPT-4 without external scaffolding.
Anthropic ships the Claude 3 family in three sizes. Opus, the flagship, beats GPT-4 on MMLU, HumanEval, MATH. Native multimodal vision. For the first time GPT-4 is no longer the outright leader.
OpenAI announces Sora, a text-to-video model producing 1080p clips up to 60 seconds with temporal consistency, plausible physics, and realistic camera moves. Limited release to red-teamers and selected artists.
Mistral drops Mixtral 8x7B via magnet link with no warning: SMoE with 8 experts of 7B, 13B active params out of 47B total. Performance matches/exceeds GPT-3.5. Apache 2.0.
Google announces Gemini Ultra/Pro/Nano, the first family of natively multimodal models (text, images, audio, video). Ultra beats GPT-4 on MMLU 90.0% vs 86.4%. Controversial demo video.
Ollama launches version 0.1: a minimal CLI to download and run local LLM models with a single command, reducing setup complexity to zero.
28 nations sign the Bletchley Declaration on catastrophic frontier AI risks. The first AI Safety Institute (UK) is established. First international diplomatic agreement specifically dedicated to AI.
Microsoft 365 Copilot reaches general availability at 30 USD/user/month. Copilot Studio also launches for building custom enterprise agents.
Biden signs the most sweeping executive order ever issued on AI: mandatory safety tests before frontier model releases, NIST standards for AI red-teaming, watermarking research, and new immigration rules for AI talent.
Meta releases Llama 2 (7B, 13B, 70B) under a license that allows commercial use up to 700M MAU. For the first time a serious LLM is genuinely deployable to production without depending on an API.
Microsoft announces Copilot across the M365 suite: AI for 300M+ enterprise users, powered by GPT-4 and Microsoft Graph for business context.
OpenAI releases GPT-4, multimodal (text + image), with reasoning, coding, and reliability clearly beyond GPT-3.5. Passes bar, medical, and coding exams.
Georgi Gerganov brings Meta's LLaMA to consumer CPUs via 4-bit C++ quantization: the first foundation model practically usable offline on a laptop.
Google presents PaLM-E, a 562B-parameter multimodal model that feeds images and robot state directly into the transformer, capable of long-horizon planning on real robots.
Microsoft makes OpenAI models (GPT-3.5-Turbo, Codex, DALL-E) available on Azure with enterprise SLA, VNet isolation, HIPAA and SOC2 compliance. A watershed moment for enterprise AI adoption.
VALL-E clones any voice with just 3 seconds of reference audio, no fine-tuning needed, using in-context learning on EnCodec tokens. First zero-shot TTS at naturalistic quality.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT, a free conversational interface on GPT-3.5 aligned via RLHF. It crosses one million users in five days.
Harrison Chase releases LangChain, an open-source Python library to chain LLMs with prompt templates, memory, tools and external data sources. It will become the default stack of the first LLM apps.
Yao et al. introduce ReAct, a schema alternating explicit thoughts (Thought) and concrete actions (Act) in LLMs, the theoretical foundation of all modern agents.
Stability AI publicly releases weights and code of a text-to-image latent diffusion model that runs on a consumer GPU. AI image generation leaves the cloud.
Tri Dao (Stanford) publishes FlashAttention: an IO-aware implementation that avoids materializing the attention matrix in HBM, achieving 2-4x speedup and 10x less GPU memory.
GitHub announces general availability of Copilot for all developers at $10/month. It's the first mass-market AI tool living inside the daily code editor.
DeepMind publishes the Chinchilla paper and shows that, given equal compute, smaller models trained on far more tokens beat oversized undertrained ones.
At GTC 2022 NVIDIA unveils the Hopper architecture and the H100 GPU, with FP8 Transformer Engine and NVLink 4. It will become the hardware substrate for nearly every large LLM of the following years.
Dario and Daniela Amodei, former VP of Research and VP of Safety at OpenAI, co-found Anthropic with a group of researchers, explicitly focused on AI safety and interpretability.
DeepMind announces that AlphaFold 2 has won the CASP14 competition with mean GDT >90, on par with experimental methods — widely regarded as solving the 50-year-old protein folding problem.
Google Research introduces the Vision Transformer, applying a pure transformer to image patches as if they were tokens, and shows that with enough pre-training it beats CNNs on ImageNet and other vision benchmarks.
Two weeks after the paper, OpenAI opens a private beta of the first general API for its language models, available to a few hundred developers building applications directly on top of GPT-3.
OpenAI publishes 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' and shows that at 175B parameters a model learns new tasks from a handful of examples in the prompt.
Lewis et al. at Facebook AI publish the RAG paper, combining a dense retriever (DPR) with a seq2seq generator (BART) to answer knowledge-intensive questions without baking all facts into the weights.
At GTC 2020 Jensen Huang announces the A100 GPU built on the Ampere architecture: 54 billion transistors, 40-80 GB HBM2e, TF32, 2:4 structured sparsity, and MIG support.