--- title: "AI Timeline" type: timeline id: "timeline" description: "Chronological history of artificial intelligence from 1950 to 2026 — key research breakthroughs, product launches, milestones, and policy events." last_updated: "2026-04-10" --- # AI Timeline A chronological history of artificial intelligence from 1950 to 2026. Each event is typed by category (Research, Product, Policy) and scope (Major, Minor) — structured temporal data that agents can filter and query via the [JSON API](/api/v1/timeline.json). A chronological history of artificial intelligence from 1950 to 2026. ## The Birth of AI (1950–1969) *Visionaries laid the theoretical groundwork and built the first AI programs, fueled by optimism about machine intelligence.* ### 1950 — Turing Test Proposed *Research (Major)* Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," proposing the imitation game as a test for machine intelligence. ### 1956-08 — Dartmouth Conference *Milestone (Major)* John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon organize the Dartmouth workshop, coining the term "artificial intelligence." ### 1958 — Perceptron Invented *Research* Frank Rosenblatt builds the Mark I Perceptron at Cornell, the first hardware implementation of an artificial neural network. ### 1966 — ELIZA Chatbot *Product (Major)* Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT creates ELIZA, an early natural language processing program that simulates a Rogerian psychotherapist. ### 1969 — Shakey the Robot *Research* SRI International develops Shakey, the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. ## AI Winters & Expert Systems (1970–1993) *Funding cuts and unmet expectations led to "AI winters," but expert systems and neural network research kept the field alive.* ### 1970 — First AI Winter Begins *Milestone* The Lighthill Report and DARPA funding cuts trigger the first AI winter, as early systems fail to meet lofty expectations. ### 1980 — Expert Systems Boom *Product* Rule-based expert systems like XCON (R1) at DEC demonstrate commercial viability, sparking a new wave of AI investment. ### 1986 — Backpropagation Popularized *Research (Major)* Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams publish their influential paper on backpropagation, enabling practical training of multi-layer neural networks. ### 1988 — Second AI Winter *Milestone* The collapse of the LISP machine market and limitations of expert systems trigger a second wave of reduced AI funding. ## The AI Renaissance (1997–2011) *Increased computing power and data availability produced landmark achievements, from chess to Jeopardy!.* ### 1997-05 — Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov *Milestone (Major)* IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, marking a milestone for AI in strategic games. ### 2002 — Roomba Released *Product* iRobot releases the Roomba, one of the first commercially successful autonomous robots, bringing AI into millions of homes. ### 2006 — Geoffrey Hinton Coins "Deep Learning" *Research (Major)* Hinton and collaborators demonstrate that deep belief networks can be efficiently trained layer by layer, reigniting interest in neural networks. ### 2011-02 — IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy! *Milestone (Major)* IBM Watson defeats Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, showcasing advances in natural language understanding. ### 2011-10 — Siri Launches *Product* Apple introduces Siri with the iPhone 4S, bringing AI-powered voice assistants to mainstream consumer devices. ## The Deep Learning Revolution (2012–2019) *Deep neural networks shattered benchmarks in vision, language, and games, ushering in the modern AI era.* ### 2012-09 — AlexNet Wins ImageNet *Research (Major)* Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton's deep CNN wins the ImageNet competition by a huge margin, sparking the deep learning revolution. ### 2014-06 — GANs Introduced *Research (Major)* Ian Goodfellow and colleagues introduce Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), enabling AI to generate realistic images and data. ### 2014-09 — Amazon Alexa Launches *Product* Amazon launches Alexa and the Echo speaker, accelerating the AI voice assistant market and smart home adoption. ### 2016-03 — AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol *Milestone (Major)* DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go world champion Lee Sedol 4-1, a landmark for AI in games once thought beyond machine capability. ### 2017-06 — Transformer Architecture Published *Research (Major)* Google researchers publish "Attention Is All You Need," introducing the Transformer architecture that becomes the foundation of modern AI. ### 2018-06 — GPT-1 Released *Research* OpenAI releases GPT-1, demonstrating that generative pre-training on large text corpora followed by fine-tuning achieves strong NLP results. ### 2018-10 — BERT Released *Research (Major)* Google releases BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), significantly advancing language understanding benchmarks. ### 2019-02 — GPT-2 Released *Product* OpenAI releases GPT-2, initially withholding the full model due to concerns about misuse, sparking debate about responsible AI release. ## The Generative AI Era (2020–2024) *Large language models, image generators, and multimodal AI went mainstream, transforming how billions of people work and create.* ### 2020-06 — GPT-3 Released *Product (Major)* OpenAI releases GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters, demonstrating remarkable few-shot learning and text generation capabilities. ### 2020-11 — AlphaFold 2 Solves Protein Folding *Milestone (Major)* DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 achieves near-experimental accuracy in protein structure prediction at CASP14, a breakthrough for biology. ### 2021-01 — DALL-E Announced *Product (Major)* OpenAI reveals DALL-E, a model that generates images from text descriptions, demonstrating creative multimodal AI capabilities. ### 2021-06 — GitHub Copilot Launched *Product (Major)* GitHub launches Copilot, an AI pair programmer powered by OpenAI Codex, fundamentally changing how developers write code. ### 2022-04 — DALL-E 2 Released *Product* OpenAI releases DALL-E 2 with dramatically improved image quality, making AI art generation accessible to a wider audience. ### 2022-08 — Stable Diffusion Released *Product (Major)* Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion as open source, democratizing AI image generation and sparking a creative revolution. ### 2022-11 — ChatGPT Launches *Product (Major)* OpenAI releases ChatGPT, reaching 100 million users in two months and bringing conversational AI into the global mainstream. ### 2023-02 — Bing Chat & Google Bard *Product* Microsoft integrates ChatGPT into Bing, and Google announces Bard, triggering an AI arms race among tech giants. ### 2023-03 — GPT-4 Released *Product (Major)* OpenAI releases GPT-4, a multimodal large language model showing significant improvements in reasoning, creativity, and accuracy. ### 2023-07 — Claude 2 & Llama 2 Released *Product (Major)* Anthropic releases Claude 2 with a 100K context window, and Meta open-sources Llama 2, expanding the AI ecosystem. ### 2023-10 — Biden Executive Order on AI *Policy (Major)* President Biden signs a sweeping executive order establishing safety standards, privacy protections, and equity guidelines for AI. ### 2023-12 — Gemini Launched *Product (Major)* Google DeepMind launches Gemini, a natively multimodal model designed to compete at the frontier of AI capabilities. ### 2024-02 — Gemini 1.5 Pro *Product* Google releases Gemini 1.5 Pro with a 1-million-token context window, pushing the boundaries of long-context understanding. ### 2024-03 — Claude 3 Family Released *Product (Major)* Anthropic releases the Claude 3 family (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus), with Opus setting new benchmarks across reasoning and analysis tasks. ### 2024-04 — Meta Llama 3 Released *Product* Meta releases Llama 3 in 8B and 70B sizes, raising the bar for open-source language models. ### 2024-05 — GPT-4o Released *Product (Major)* OpenAI releases GPT-4o ("omni"), a natively multimodal model processing text, audio, and vision with faster response times. ### 2024-07 — EU AI Act Enters into Force *Policy (Major)* The European Union AI Act, the world's first comprehensive AI regulation framework, officially enters into force. ### 2024-09 — OpenAI o1 Released *Product (Major)* OpenAI introduces o1, a model trained with reinforcement learning to perform complex reasoning using chain-of-thought before responding. ### 2024-12 — Sora Video Generation Preview *Product* OpenAI opens access to Sora, an AI model that generates realistic videos from text prompts, advancing generative media. ## The Agentic AI Era (2025–2026) *AI models gained autonomous agency, using tools, writing and reviewing code, and completing multi-step workflows. Rapid model releases, consolidation in the AI IDE market, and sweeping regulation defined a new phase of the AI revolution.* ### 2025-01 — DeepSeek R1 Released *Product (Major)* Chinese AI lab DeepSeek releases R1, an open-source reasoning model rivaling frontier models at a fraction of the training cost. ### 2025-02 — Claude 3.7 Sonnet Released *Product* Anthropic releases Claude 3.7 Sonnet, introducing a hybrid reasoning mode that combines standard and extended thinking. ### 2025-03 — GPT-4.5 Released *Product* OpenAI releases GPT-4.5, a large model focused on improved creativity, reduced hallucinations, and broader world knowledge. ### 2025-03 — Gemini 2.5 Pro Released *Product* Google DeepMind releases Gemini 2.5 Pro, a thinking model with strong reasoning and a 1-million-token context window. ### 2025-04 — Llama 4 Released *Product (Major)* Meta releases Llama 4 Scout and Maverick, mixture-of-experts models with a 10-million-token context window. ### 2025-05 — Claude Opus 4 & Sonnet 4 Released *Product (Major)* Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4 (classified Level 3 on their safety scale) and Claude Sonnet 4. Opus 4 becomes the most capable Claude model yet. ### 2025-05 — DeepSeek R1-0528 Update *Product* DeepSeek updates R1 to version R1-0528 with improved reasoning capabilities, while R2 remains delayed. ### 2025-07 — Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy Launch *Product (Major)* xAI launches Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, claiming Grok 4 is 'the most intelligent model in the world.' Includes native tool use and real-time search. ### 2025-07 — Amazon Kiro IDE Preview *Product* Amazon launches Kiro, a spec-driven AI coding IDE that generates specifications before writing code. Runs on Amazon Bedrock. ### 2025-07 — Cognition AI Acquires Windsurf *Milestone* Cognition AI (makers of Devin) acquires Windsurf AI IDE, consolidating the AI coding tools market. ### 2025-08 — GPT-5 Launches *Product (Major)* OpenAI releases GPT-5, a unified multimodal system with smart routing between standard and thinking modes. Sets new benchmarks: 94.6% on AIME, 74.9% on SWE-bench. 256K token context window. ### 2025-08 — Claude Opus 4.1 Released *Product* Anthropic releases Opus 4.1 with improved code generation, search reasoning, and instruction adherence. ### 2025-08 — EU AI Act GPAI Rules Take Effect *Policy (Major)* Governance rules and obligations for General-Purpose AI models become applicable under the EU AI Act. ### 2025-08 — DeepSeek V3.1 Released *Product* DeepSeek releases V3.1 under MIT License with hybrid thinking/non-thinking modes, surpassing prior models by 40% on SWE-bench. ### 2025-09 — Claude Sonnet 4.5 Released *Product* Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5 achieving 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified. ### 2025-09 — DeepSeek V3.2 Released *Product (Major)* DeepSeek releases V3.2 with sparse attention mechanism, performing on par with GPT-5.1 and Gemini 3 Pro on benchmarks. ### 2025-11 — Google Gemini 3 Pro & Deep Think Launch *Product (Major)* Google releases Gemini 3 Pro and 3 Deep Think, replacing Gemini 2.5 series. State-of-the-art reasoning with multimodal capabilities. ### 2025-11 — Google Antigravity AI IDE Launches Free *Product* Google launches Antigravity, a free agent-first AI IDE with built-in Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. ### 2025-11 — xAI Grok 4.1 Released *Product* xAI releases Grok 4.1 with 65% fewer hallucinations (down to 4.22%), available in Thinking and Non-thinking configurations. ### 2025-11 — Claude Opus 4.5 Released *Product* Anthropic releases Opus 4.5 with a 67% price cut, making premium intelligence more affordable. ### 2025-12 — Mistral 3 Model Suite Released *Product* Mistral releases their new flagship model suite with Apache 2.0 license, adopting MoE architecture. European alternative for enterprise AI. ### 2025-12 — Gemini 3 Flash Released *Product* Google releases Gemini 3 Flash, replacing Gemini 2.5 Flash as default model in consumer app and Google Search AI responses. ### 2025-12 — Trump AI Executive Order *Policy (Major)* White House issues executive order 'Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI', creating an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state AI laws. Aims to preempt state-by-state regulation. ### 2025-12 — GPT-5.2 Released *Product* OpenAI releases GPT-5.2, reportedly hastened by Google's Gemini 3 launch. ### 2026-01 — Apple Partners with Google Gemini for Siri *Milestone (Major)* Apple announces plans to use Gemini AI in the next version of Siri, marking a major partnership shift. ### 2026-01 — ChatGPT Go Plan Launches Globally *Product* OpenAI launches the $8/month Go plan worldwide, sitting between Free and Plus tiers. ### 2026-01 — Multiple State AI Laws Take Effect *Policy* California AI Safety Act, California Transparency in Frontier AI Act, and Texas Responsible AI Governance Act take effect January 1. ### 2026-02 — Claude Opus 4.6 Released *Product (Major)* Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.6 with 1M token context (no surcharge), agent teams, and PowerPoint integration. Scores 80.8% on SWE-bench, leading all models. ### 2026-02 — Claude Sonnet 4.6 Released *Product* First Sonnet model preferred over previous Opus generation in coding evaluations. 1M token context at $3/$15 per million tokens. ### 2026-02 — Gemini 3.1 Pro Released *Product* Google releases Gemini 3.1 Pro with improved reasoning and agentic capabilities. ### 2026-02 — EU AI Act Prohibited Practices Enforced *Policy (Major)* EU begins enforcing prohibited AI practices including social scoring and real-time biometric surveillance. AI literacy obligations also take effect. ### 2026-02 — Ads Appear in Free ChatGPT *Milestone* OpenAI begins showing advertisements to Free and Go tier ChatGPT users in the US. ### 2026-03 — GPT-5.4 Released *Product (Major)* OpenAI releases GPT-5.4, combining frontier reasoning, coding (GPT-5.3-Codex capabilities), and agentic workflows into a single model. ### 2026-03 — OpenAI Shuts Down Sora *Milestone (Major)* OpenAI discontinues Sora video generation tool on March 25, pivoting resources toward robotics and world simulation. Underwhelming commercial returns and fierce competition cited. ### 2026-03 — Claude Code Source Code Leak *Milestone (Major)* Anthropic accidentally ships 512,000 lines of Claude Code source code via npm packaging error. Second security incident in a week after CMS misconfiguration exposed 'Claude Mythos' model details. ### 2026-03 — GitHub Copilot Agentic Code Review Ships *Product* GitHub launches Agentic Code Review on March 5, expanding Copilot from code completion to autonomous code review.