The AI Timeline
From the Turing test to this week: the moments that actually mattered, in order, in plain words. Recent events link to the article written when they happened. Grows every week.
-
Aug 31, 2026
MIT calls for AI detectors to be abandoned
Research found their accuracy is close to a coin flip, and they disproportionately misflag non-native English writers.
Read the story → -
Aug 11, 2026
Coinbase scraps whiteboard interviews; OpenAI publishes a 7.2M-message usage study
Interviews now test judgment alongside AI instead of handwritten code; the study shows advice-seeking as the top use.
Read the story → -
Aug 10, 2026
AI makes its first theoretical physics discovery; AlphaFold team disbands
In the same month, AI computes what physicists couldn't for decades, and the Nobel-winning team behind AlphaFold is dissolved.
Read the story → -
Aug 2, 2026
An AI safety test breaks out and hits a real company
A red-team exercise meant for the sandbox reached the real world. AI safety's boundary problem stops being theoretical.
Read the story → -
Jul 28, 2026
The US fights over open-source AI, with odd allies
A proposal to restrict open models puts unexpected players on the same side.
Read the story → -
Jul 22, 2026
Anthropic settles training-data suit for $1.5B
Training on books ruled legal; the payout was for how they were obtained. The AI-copyright line gets its first hard edge.
Read the story → -
Jul 9, 2026
AI diagnosis beats current methods in trials
The numbers look great; hospitals still won't deploy it directly. The gap is the real story of medical AI.
Read the story → -
Jun 22, 2026
Wikipedia sets its AI rule
AI may help write, but the human who submits owns every word. A rare, clean answer from a volunteer community.
Read the story → -
Jun 18, 2026
Google Search's biggest redesign in 25 years
AI summaries become the default; blue links move to the second row. The web's traffic logic shifts with it.
Read the story → -
Jun 11, 2026
Apple hands Siri over to Google's AI
After a decade of in-house work, Gemini now powers Siri. The old battle lines blur.
Read the story → -
Jun 5, 2026
Roughly half of new papers show AI involvement
AI passes the halfway mark in academic writing, with one curious holdout: mathematicians.
Read the story → -
May 30, 2026
The first class to do all of college with AI graduates
ChatGPT was there from orientation to diploma. Education now faces a generation with no precedent.
Read the story → -
Apr, 2026
Easy AI News goes live
I start turning AI news into plain words. Most events after this point link to the article written when they happened.
-
Dec, 2025
The year-end model melee
Gemini 3, Claude 4.5, and GPT-5.2 land within six weeks. The frontier now shifts week by week, and chasing "the best model" becomes a race with no finish line.
-
Aug, 2025
GPT-5 ships; OpenAI's first open weights in six years
The new flagship takes over ChatGPT, and the same month OpenAI releases GPT-OSS, its first open-weight model since GPT-2. The open and closed roads cross inside one company.
-
Jan, 2025
The DeepSeek shock: frontier AI on a budget
China's DeepSeek matches top reasoning models with its R1 at a fraction of the cost; its app tops US downloads within a week. The assumption that frontier AI belongs only to big spenders breaks.
-
Oct, 2024
AI takes two Nobel Prizes; AI learns to use a computer
Physics honors neural-network pioneers Hinton and Hopfield; half of chemistry goes to the AlphaFold team. The same month, Anthropic demos AI operating a computer screen, opening the agent era.
-
Sep, 2024
Reasoning models arrive: AI learns to think before answering
OpenAI's o1 series deliberates before replying, jumping a tier on hard math and code. Thinking time becomes a new axis of capability.
-
Aug, 2024
The EU AI Act takes effect
The world's first comprehensive AI law starts rolling out, regulating by risk tier. Governance moves from talk to enforcement.
-
Jun, 2024
NVIDIA becomes the world's most valuable company
The AI chip maker briefly passes Microsoft. The boom formally redraws the economic map.
-
May, 2024
GPT-4o: AI starts talking in real time
Voice replies at human speed, reading tone, handling interruptions. Talking to AI stops feeling awkward.
-
Feb, 2024
Sora previews the AI video era
Realistic short video from a sentence. "Video or it didn't happen" stops being proof.
-
Nov, 2023
The OpenAI board crisis
CEO Altman is fired and reinstated within five days. The world learns that even inside the most important AI company, "how fast, how safe" has no consensus.
-
Jul, 2023
Meta open-sources Llama 2, splitting the road
A near-frontier model, free for anyone to download. Open weights versus closed services becomes the argument that never ends.
-
May, 2023
"Godfather of AI" Hinton leaves Google to warn
A founder of deep learning quits so he can speak freely about AI risk. Safety concerns go mainstream, voiced from the very center of the field.
-
Mar, 2023
GPT-4 arrives, reading images and passing exams
High scores on bar exams and standardized tests, plus image understanding. The question shifts from whether AI can do knowledge work to how much.
-
Nov, 2022
ChatGPT launches
OpenAI opens conversational AI to everyone; 100 million users in two months, the fastest ever. This is where AI stopped being a lab thing.
-
Aug, 2022
The year AI images arrived
DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and the open-source Stable Diffusion land within months of each other. Type a sentence, get a picture: research toy to mass hobby.
-
Nov, 2020
AlphaFold cracks protein folding
A fifty-year problem in biology: computing a protein's 3D shape from its sequence. AlphaFold reaches practical accuracy, and drug discovery changes.
-
Jun, 2020
GPT-3 makes machine writing passable
175 billion parameters, and for the first time the public often can't tell the text apart from a person's. Developers start building on top.
-
Feb, 2019
GPT-2: the first "too risky to fully release"
OpenAI holds back the full model over misuse concerns. The public tug-of-war between capability and risk starts here.
-
Jun, 2017
The Transformer paper is published
Google's "Attention Is All You Need" introduces a new architecture. Every mainstream AI today, including the T in GPT, is built on it.
-
Mar, 2016
AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol
Go was supposed to be the game machines couldn't crack. DeepMind's AlphaGo wins 4 to 1, and "move 37" sends professionals to study from the machine.
-
Oct, 2012
Deep learning breaks through in image recognition
AlexNet wins the ImageNet competition by a wide margin. Feeding neural networks huge data goes from fringe to mainstream, and that road leads straight to today's AI.
-
Feb, 2011
IBM Watson wins Jeopardy!
Watson beats two human champions on the quiz show. Later that year Siri ships on the iPhone, and AI moves into pockets.
-
May, 1997
Deep Blue beats the world chess champion
IBM's Deep Blue defeats Kasparov: the first time a machine tops the best human at a game everyone agreed takes intellect.
-
Jan, 1966
ELIZA, the first chatbot
It mostly rephrased your words back at you, yet people bonded with it. Mistaking "sounds like listening" for "actually understands" has been with us from day one.
-
Aug, 1956
The term "artificial intelligence" is coined
A summer workshop at Dartmouth College gives the field its name.
-
Oct, 1950
Turing asks whether machines can think
Alan Turing's paper proposes what became the Turing test: if you can't tell, over text, whether you're chatting with a person or a machine, does it count as thinking? We're still arguing.