A history of modern AI, through the people who made it
From 1986 to 2026: what the people on this site did, in order, alongside the milestones that moved the field. Pick people to follow their paths.
1940s
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Born in London
Son of the entomologist H. E. Hinton and a great-great-grandson of the logician George Boole.
Geoffrey Hinton
1960s
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Born in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France
Grew up in the Paris suburbs, the son of an engineer, and traced his interest in machine intelligence to HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001.
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Born in Taipei
The family later lived in Thailand; at nine he was sent to the United States with his older brother.
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Born in Paris
To a Moroccan Jewish family that later emigrated to Canada; his brother Samy also became a machine learning researcher.
Yann LeCun
Jensen Huang
Yoshua Bengio
1970s
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BA in experimental psychology, King's College, Cambridge
Arrived at neural networks via a schoolfriend's talk of holograms and distributed memory.
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Born in London
Parents from Hong Kong; the family moved to Singapore in 1984.
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Born in London
Born 27 July; learned chess at four and played on England junior teams until thirteen.
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Born in Beijing, China
Named for a bird her father caught on the way to the hospital; raised in Chengdu, Sichuan.
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Born in Hanham, England
Born 26 September 1976, near Bristol.
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PhD in artificial intelligence, University of Edinburgh
Supervised by Christopher Longuet-Higgins, with a thesis on relaxation in vision.
Andrew Ng
Demis Hassabis
Fei-Fei Li
David Silver
1980s
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Born in San Francisco
Grows up in the city with his sister Daniela; attends Lowell High School.
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Born in London
Grows up off the Caledonian Road in Islington, the son of a Syrian taxi driver and an English nurse.
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Born in Chicago
The family moves to Clayton, Missouri, in 1989; he attends John Burroughs School in Ladue.
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Backpropagation paper in Nature
With Rumelhart and Williams, a year after the Boltzmann machine paper with Ackley and Sejnowski.
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PhD, Université Pierre et Marie Curie
After an engineering diploma from ESIEE Paris in 1983, his thesis proposed a form of backpropagation independently of Hinton's group; he then spent 1987-88 as a postdoc with Hinton in Toronto.
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Joins the University of Toronto
Left Carnegie Mellon for a CIFAR fellowship; ran UCL's Gatsby Unit from 1998 to 2001 before returning.
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Joins AT&T Bell Labs
Research scientist in the Adaptive Systems Research Department in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he developed convolutional neural networks.
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Backpropagation applied to handwritten zip code recognition
Neural Computation paper showing a convolutional network trained end to end on US Postal Service digits.
Dario Amodei
Mustafa Suleyman
Sam Altman
1990s
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PhD, McGill University
Thesis on neural networks for sequence recognition, supervised by Renato De Mori; postdocs followed at MIT with Michael I. Jordan and at AT&T Bell Labs with Yann LeCun.
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Joins her father in Parsippany, New Jersey
Arrived at fifteen by her own account; a teacher, Bob Sabella, taught her calculus at lunch and later lent her family $20,000 for a dry-cleaning shop.
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Co-founds NVIDIA
With Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, after planning the company in a Denny's in San Jose; Huang is chief executive from the first day.
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Joins the Université de Montréal
Started the research group that grew into Mila.
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Vanishing gradients paper
With Simard and Frasconi, proved why gradient descent struggles with long-range dependencies in recurrent networks.
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Theme Park
Co-designed and lead-programmed the Bullfrog simulation during a gap year, aged seventeen.
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Graduates from Carnegie Mellon
Two bachelor's degrees, in mathematics and computer science and in statistics, with a further major in economics.
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BA, Christ's College, Cambridge
Graduated with the Addison-Wesley award; knew Demis Hassabis from university.
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Double first, Cambridge
Computer Science Tripos at Queens' College, where he first encountered the protein folding problem.
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CTO of Elixir Studios
Joined Hassabis's new London games studio as chief technology officer and lead programmer on Republic, The Revolution.
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Founded Elixir Studios
Signed a three-game deal with Eidos after pitching at E3; shipped Republic and Evil Genius before closing in 2005.
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DjVu document compression
As head of image processing at AT&T Labs (1996-2002) he co-created DjVu, a compression format for scanned documents, with Bottou, Haffner and Howard.
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MS, MIT
Built an automatically indexed search engine for machine learning papers, a precursor to CiteSeer.
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Leaves Ethiopia at 15
After the Eritrean-Ethiopian War began in May 1998 and Eritrean relatives were deported, she was refused a US visa and went to Ireland; the next year she entered the US as a refugee and finished high school in Somerville, Massachusetts.
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LeNet-5 and the MNIST benchmark
The Proceedings of the IEEE paper on gradient-based learning described LeNet-5, the check-reading system and the MNIST benchmark of handwritten digits.
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Rule learning in seven-month-old infants
A Science paper with three co-authors reported infants generalizing abstract syllable patterns to new syllables, evidence he used for built-in rule-learning machinery.
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BA in Physics, Princeton University
Graduated with high honors after four years of weekend trips home to run the family business.
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GeForce 256, "the world's first GPU"
NVIDIA coins the term graphics processing unit for a chip that moves transform and lighting work off the CPU.
Timnit Gebru
Gary Marcus
2000s
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U.S. Physics Team
One of 24 students named to the national team's training camp at the University of Maryland, from which five went on to the International Physics Olympiad.
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PhD, Stanford
Dissertation on copula absence in African American English, advised by Thomas Wasow and Penelope Eckert.
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Muslim Youth Helpline
Helps Mohammed Mamdani set up a telephone counselling service for young British Muslims, and later leaves Oxford to work on it.
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Enters Stanford
Studied electrical engineering; a junior-year piano-key project led to an Apple internship in audio hardware and a full-time job the following year.
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Joins Stanford faculty
Assistant professor of computer science, with a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering.
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Neural probabilistic language model
The JMLR paper that learned word embeddings as a by-product of next-word prediction.
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PhD, Berkeley
Completed under Michael Jordan with a thesis on shaping and policy search in reinforcement learning.
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Professor at NYU's Courant Institute
Returned to neural network research with a lab working on energy-based models, unsupervised learning and robot navigation.
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Directs CIFAR's Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program
Led the program until 2013; its members included Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.
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Founding member of CIFAR's Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program
The Hinton-led program sustained the deep learning community; he has co-directed its successor, Learning in Machines & Brains, with Bengio since 2014.
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Founding member of CIFAR's Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program
The Hinton-led program that kept deep learning funded; he later co-directed its successor, Learning in Machines & Brains.
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PhD student under Richard Sutton
Left the games industry for the University of Alberta and worked on Monte Carlo tree search for Go with Sylvain Gelly.
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PhD in Electrical Engineering, Caltech
Dissertation on visual recognition advised by Pietro Perona and Christof Koch; joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as assistant professor.
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BSc in mathematics, University of Toronto
Admitted out of Grade 11, he graduated in the same hall where he would receive an honorary doctorate twenty years later.
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Leaves Stanford for Loopt and Y Combinator's first batch
With two classmates he drops out to build a location-sharing app, one of eight companies in Paul Graham's first summer cohort.
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Deep belief networks
Layer-by-layer pretraining with Osindero and Teh, plus deep autoencoders in Science with Salakhutdinov.
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CUDA released
A C-language environment for general-purpose computing on NVIDIA GPUs, shipped with the GeForce 8800.
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Father's death turns him toward biophysics
Riccardo Amodei's death from a long illness redirects his Princeton research toward biology and the retina.
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Amnesia and imagination paper
First paper, in PNAS, showed patients with hippocampal damage cannot imagine new scenes; listed by Science among the year's breakthroughs.
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Begins ImageNet at Princeton
Set out to collect a thousand images for each WordNet noun, first with paid undergraduates, then with Amazon Mechanical Turk.
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Sloan Research Fellowship
Awarded while an assistant professor at Stanford.
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Publishes Kluge
His account of the mind as a product of evolutionary improvisation became a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
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Autonomous helicopter airshows
Apprenticeship learning from a human pilot; the work won the ICML best application paper award.
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Named to MIT Technology Review's TR35
One of 35 innovators under 35, at 32, for the STAIR household-robot project.
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Stanford Engineering Everywhere goes online
Begun in 2007 with the Stanford Center for Professional Development, it posted about a dozen complete Stanford courses, including CS229, online free.
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IJCAI Computers and Thought Award
Shared with Carlos Guestrin; the ROS paper and his group's GPU deep learning paper appeared the same year.
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PhD, University College London
Supervised by Eleanor Maguire; postdoctoral fellowship at the Gatsby Unit, where he met Shane Legg.
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PhD, University of Alberta
Thesis: Reinforcement Learning and Simulation-Based Search in Computer Go.
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ImageNet paper at CVPR
The paper with Jia Deng as first author has been cited more than 76,000 times.
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Joins Stanford
Started at Stanford as an assistant professor after two years at Princeton.
Emily M. Bender
Ilya Sutskever
2010s
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Founded DeepMind
With Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, to build AGI using games as a proving ground.
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Co-founds DeepMind
With Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg; he becomes chief product officer and writes the business plan.
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Founding lead of Google Brain
Began the deep learning project at Google with Jeff Dean and Greg Corrado.
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The first 100,000-student class
His free online Machine Learning class opened on 10 October, running on a platform he and his students had built.
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Royal Society University Research Fellowship
Took up the fellowship at UCL and became a lecturer; recorded his ten-lecture reinforcement learning course in 2015.
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PhD, Princeton University
Dissertation on network-scale electrophysiology, which later won the 2012 Hertz Thesis Prize; postdoc at Stanford Medicine follows.
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Publishes Guitar Zero
The book on learning an instrument as an adult became a New York Times bestseller.
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Loopt sold to Green Dot
The deal is worth about 43 million dollars and nets Altman about 5 million; he then starts Hydrazine Capital with his brother Jack.
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Co-founds Coursera
Formed with Daphne Koller from the platform behind his online Machine Learning class.
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The cat neuron paper
The Google Brain network learned face and cat detectors from unlabeled YouTube frames.
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AlexNet wins the ImageNet challenge
Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton's GPU-trained network cut the top-5 error on Fei-Fei Li's ImageNet benchmark from 25.8 to 16.4 percent, and computer vision switched to deep learning.
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Co-founds ICLR
With Bengio established the International Conference on Learning Representations, first held in 2013 with open peer review.
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New Yorker essay questions the deep learning revolution
Weeks after the ImageNet result, he argued that deep learning lacked ways to represent causality, logical inference and abstract ideas.
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Founds NYU Center for Data Science
Became founding director of the center, which NYU announced as part of a university-wide initiative in data science.
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Google acquires DNNresearch
Hinton began a decade of half-time work at Google as Vice President and Engineering Fellow.
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Google acquires DNNresearch
Hinton's three-person startup is bought by Google, and Sutskever joins Google Brain as a research scientist.
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Joined DeepMind full time
Had consulted for the company since its founding in 2010; later led its reinforcement learning research group.
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PhD in computer science, University of Toronto
His thesis, "Training Recurrent Neural Networks," was supervised by Hinton.
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Director of the Stanford AI Lab
Led SAIL until October 2018; co-founded the SAILORS girls' summer camp in 2015.
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Returns to Stanford for a PhD in Fei-Fei Li's lab
Began the Street View project on estimating neighborhood demographics from cars, funded by NSF and Stanford DARE fellowships.
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Founding director of FAIR at Facebook
Hired by Mark Zuckerberg in December 2013 to build Facebook AI Research while keeping a part-time NYU post.
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Google acquires DeepMind
Reported price of 400 million pounds; the lab stayed in London at his insistence.
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Google acquires DeepMind
Reported price of 400 million pounds; Suleyman goes on to lead DeepMind's applied division.
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Named president of Y Combinator
Graham announces that Altman will take over "starting next batch," writing that YC needs to grow and he is not the best person to grow it.
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Chief scientist at Baidu
Vice president and chief scientist; his Silicon Valley lab produced the Deep Speech 2 speech recognition system.
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Generative adversarial networks
Ian Goodfellow and colleagues in Yoshua Bengio's Montreal lab trained an image generator by pitting it against a second network that tried to spot its fakes, the method behind the realistic synthetic faces of 2017 and 2018.
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Sequence to sequence learning
With Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le he posts the paper that applies paired recurrent networks to machine translation.
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Attention for machine translation
Co-author, with Bahdanau and Cho, of the attention-based translation paper.
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Joins Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab
First AI job, in Andrew Ng's group; first author of "Deep Speech 2" a year later.
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Eight days as Reddit's interim CEO
He steps in after Yishan Wong resigns and writes when it ends that the stint was "sort of fun."
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Deep Q-Network in Nature
One network learned dozens of Atari games from pixels; the paper had nearly 10,000 citations within five years.
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Warns about "superhuman machine intelligence"
A blog post calls SMI "probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
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Senior research scientist, Google Brain
About ten months at Google's deep learning group before OpenAI recruits him.
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Co-founds OpenAI
He leaves Google to become research director of the new nonprofit lab, later its chief scientist.
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Co-founds OpenAI
The lab is announced as a nonprofit with six co-founders and a billion dollars in pledges.
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AlphaGo in Nature
Led the project; the Nature paper reported the 5-0 win over Fan Hui.
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Launches DeepMind Health
Announced at the Royal Society of Medicine, with the Streams kidney-injury alert app as its first product.
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Collège de France chair
Delivered the inaugural lecture of the annual computer science chair.
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DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, winner of 18 world Go titles, four games to one in Seoul, years before Go programmers had expected a machine to win without a handicap.
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Lead author of "Concrete Problems in AI Safety"
The paper turns alignment into a list of tractable engineering problems.
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Joins OpenAI
Sam Altman recruits him to what is then a small nonprofit, where he works on AI safety.
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Data-centre cooling
DeepMind cut Google data-centre cooling energy by up to 40 percent.
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Data-centre cooling result
His applied team's system cuts the energy used to cool Google's data centres by up to 40 percent.
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Delivers the first DGX-1 to OpenAI
Huang hand-delivers the eight-GPU server to OpenAI's San Francisco office.
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Partnership on AI
Founding co-chair of the industry body launched by Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM.
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Founding member of the Partnership on AI
Represented Facebook among the founding members of the industry group.
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Co-founds Element AI
The Montreal startup, which ServiceNow agreed to acquire in November 2020.
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Deep Learning textbook
Published the MIT Press textbook with Goodfellow and Courville.
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Uber buys Geometric Intelligence
The 15-person startup he co-founded became the founding team of Uber AI Labs, with Marcus as director.
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Counts six Black attendees at NIPS in Barcelona
The count, and a Facebook post about "groupthink, insularity, and arrogance in the AI community," led to the founding of Black in AI with Rediet Abebe in 2017.
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Chief Scientist of AI/ML, Google Cloud
Sabbatical role from January 2017 to September 2018 covering AutoML, the Kaggle acquisition and Google AI's Beijing centre; SAILORS became the nonprofit AI4ALL.
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Leaves Baidu
His departure note said the AI group had grown to roughly 1,300 people and ended with "AI is the new electricity."
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Steps down from Uber AI Labs
Left the director's post four months after the lab was created, staying on as a special adviser.
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Co-founds the Vector Institute
Became Chief Scientific Adviser of the Toronto research institute.
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Eight Google-affiliated researchers replaced recurrence with attention in "Attention Is All You Need," and the architecture became the basis of GPT, BERT and nearly every large language model after them.
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Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
An OpenAI and DeepMind paper that trained agents from people's choices between pairs of video clips, the method later called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
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Announces DeepLearning.AI
The first of three new AI projects he started after leaving Baidu.
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Officer of the Order of Canada
Also received Quebec's Marie-Victorin Prize and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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ICO ruling on the Royal Free data deal
The regulator finds the hospital's transfer of 1.6 million patient records to DeepMind broke data protection law; Suleyman writes "We got that wrong."
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Joins Microsoft Research as a postdoc
Took a position in the FATE group in New York, having decided she wanted to help contain the technology's power rather than expand it.
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Deep Learning Specialization launches
DeepLearning.AI's first offering, five courses on Coursera.
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PhD, Stanford
Her thesis on computer vision for sociology closed with a turn toward studying algorithmic bias.
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AlphaGo Zero
Learned Go from random play with no human data and beat the Lee Sedol version 100-0.
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First Black in AI workshop
Held at NIPS in Long Beach, where Jeff Dean and Samy Bengio of Google Brain first suggested she join them.
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Street View study in PNAS
The paper inferred income, race, education and votes in 200 US cities from 22 million cars.
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Founds Landing AI
A company to bring computer vision to manufacturing and other industries outside consumer internet.
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Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal
The arXiv paper listed ten concerns and argued that deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques.
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Innateness, AlphaZero, and Artificial Intelligence
Argued that DeepMind's "tabula rasa" claims for AlphaGo Zero understated the structure its designers built in.
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AI Fund launches
A venture studio that co-founds startups rather than investing in existing ones, launched with $175 million.
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Vice President and Chief AI Scientist, Meta
Handed FAIR's management to others to focus on research direction and strategy.
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Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru's audit of three commercial face-analysis products, which misclassified darker-skinned women up to 34.7 percent of the time and lighter-skinned men at most 0.8 percent.
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Datasheets for Datasets first circulates
Posted to arXiv; the final version appeared in Communications of the ACM in December 2021.
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UCL inaugural lecture
Gave his inaugural lecture as a UCL professor on AlphaZero.
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Project Maven emails leak
Leaked emails on Google's Pentagon contract made her a face of the controversy.
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House testimony
On 26 June she told Congress AI must be human-centered.
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Joins Google
Research scientist and co-lead of the Ethical AI team with Margaret Mitchell.
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Google's pretrained transformer that read text in both directions, set records on eleven language tasks, and was released with its weights three weeks later for anyone to fine-tune.
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"Natural Language" is not a synonym for "English"
The tweet restated a rule from her 2011 paper and led others to name it the Bender Rule the following spring.
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AlphaZero in Science
One algorithm mastered chess, shogi and Go by self-play.
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Companion of the Order of Canada
The highest of the order's three grades.
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Model Cards for Model Reporting
Co-authored with Mitchell and colleagues at FAT*; it became the template for model documentation on Hugging Face.
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OpenAI announced a 1.5-billion-parameter language model and withheld the full weights over misuse concerns, releasing it in stages through November 2019.
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2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award announced
Hinton, Bengio and LeCun share the award "for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing."
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Co-founds Stanford HAI
Launched 18 March with John Etchemendy and 200 faculty; criticised within a week for the demographics of its faculty list.
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Becomes CEO of OpenAI's new capped-profit company
Leaves YC in March, the week the restructuring is announced.
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The Amazon letter
Signed the open letter from 26 researchers asking Amazon to stop selling facial recognition to law enforcement.
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Microsoft invests one billion dollars
The investment in the capped-profit company later grows to 13 billion dollars.
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Placed on leave from DeepMind
Follows staff complaints about his management that an outside lawyer investigated.
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The
Explained in The Gradient why naming the language studied, even English, matters for the field.
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Publishes Rebooting AI with Ernest Davis
The book made the case for common sense, causal models and hybrid systems.
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AlphaStar
Co-led the grandmaster-level StarCraft II agent.
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Debates Yoshua Bengio in Montreal
The 23 December debate on symbols and deep learning capped a year-long argument on Twitter.
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Moves to Google
Takes a vice-president role in AI policy at Google rather than returning to DeepMind.
2020s
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Scaling laws for neural language models
An OpenAI paper showing that language-model error falls as a smooth power law in model size, data and compute, which turned building bigger models into a forecast labs could budget against.
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Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
Cited for building the large databases behind machine learning.
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The Next Decade in AI
An arXiv paper setting out a hybrid program of neural networks, symbolic reasoning, knowledge and cognitive models.
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ACM Prize in Computing
Received the 2019 prize, with $250,000 from Infosys.
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A 175-billion-parameter language model that could do new tasks from a few examples in its prompt, offered only through a commercial API and then licensed exclusively to Microsoft.
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Joins Twitter's board
Served as an independent director of Twitter until Musk dissolved the board in October 2022.
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The octopus paper at ACL
"Climbing towards NLU," with Alexander Koller, argued that meaning cannot be learned from form alone and won the Best Theme Paper award.
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No prior hits for "stochastic parrot"
Having come up with the phrase while drafting the paper with Timnit Gebru, she searched Google in early October and found no earlier use.
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Elected to the National Academy of Medicine
Her second academy election of the year, after the National Academy of Engineering.
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Robotics startup with Rodney Brooks raises Series A
The company he led as CEO, with Brooks as CTO, raised 15 million dollars, for 22.5 million in total.
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DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 predicted protein structures at close to experimental accuracy in the CASP14 blind assessment, the result Demis Hassabis cites as the first proof that AI can advance science.
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MIT Technology Review publishes the paper's contents
Two days after Gebru's exit from Google, the magazine summarized the draft, which it obtained from Bender.
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Leaves OpenAI
Departs with his sister Daniela and five other colleagues.
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Exit from Google
Ordered to retract or remove Google names from Stochastic Parrots, she set conditions and was told her employment would end "faster than your email reflects"; she says she was fired, Google says she resigned. Pichai apologized to staff on 9 December.
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Margaret Mitchell fired
Her Ethical AI co-lead, who had searched her corporate email for evidence of discrimination against Gebru, was fired on 19 February.
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On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots
A critique of ever-larger language models by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru and colleagues, published after a dispute over the draft ended with both of Google's Ethical AI co-leads leaving the company.
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Co-founds Anthropic
Public benefit corporation raises a 124 million dollar Series A; Constitutional AI follows in 2022.
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Fellow of the Royal Society
Elected FRS for his contributions to Deep Q-Networks and AlphaGo.
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Reward is enough
Published the reward-is-enough hypothesis with Singh, Precup and Sutton, which drew a formal rebuttal.
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Founded Isomorphic Labs
Alphabet drug-design company spun out of DeepMind; Hassabis is CEO.
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Elected to lead the ACL
Chosen as vice president-elect, on track to become president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2024.
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DAIR founded
Launched a year to the day after her exit, with $3.7 million from four foundations.
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Nature's 10
Nature named her one of the ten people who shaped science that year.
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OpenAI fine-tuned GPT-3 on human demonstrations and rankings, and labelers preferred the 1.3-billion-parameter result to the 175-billion-parameter original; the method became the recipe for ChatGPT.
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Joins Greylock
Leaves Google to become a venture partner at Reid Hoffman's firm.
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Posts that large networks may be "slightly conscious"
A single-sentence post sets off a public argument among researchers about machine consciousness.
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Alex Hanna joins DAIR
The sociologist left Google to become DAIR's director of research.
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Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall
Nautilus essay arguing that scaling was approaching diminishing returns and that AI needed symbol manipulation.
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Co-founds Inflection AI
With Hoffman and Karén Simonyan, to build AI people can talk to in plain language.
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Launches his Substack newsletter
Began as The Road to AI We Can Trust and was later renamed Marcus on AI.
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Offers Elon Musk a bet on AGI by 2029
Proposed five tasks that AI would not do in 2029 and a 100,000 dollar stake; backers raised it to 500,000 dollars within a week.
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Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
Britain's national academy of sciences elects him a Fellow.
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TIME 100
Listed among TIME's 100 most influential people, with a tribute by Safiya Noble.
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Guardian essay on LaMDA
After a Google engineer claimed the company's chatbot was sentient, she wrote that human-like programs "abuse our empathy."
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A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence
Position paper in June proposing world models, hierarchical planning and the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture; FAIR released I-JEPA a year later.
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Debates Christopher Manning at NAACL
A conference panel on whether language models can learn meaning without reference to the world.
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A text-to-image model whose weights anyone could download and run on a gaming PC, while its best-known rival sat behind a waitlist; within a month a member of Congress asked the White House to act against it.
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First U.S. license requirement on AI chips to China
The government requires licenses for A100 and H100 exports to China and Russia.
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First Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 stream
A one-off live stream with Alex Hanna reacting to AI hype, which became a series and, in 2023, a podcast.
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Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
The 2023 prize, shared with John Jumper for AlphaFold.
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OpenAI's free "research preview" chatbot, which reached an estimated 100 million users in two months and within six months had senators opening a hearing with a speech it wrote.
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Seven predictions for GPT-4
Published on Christmas Day, forecasting that GPT-4 would still hallucinate, make reasoning errors and fall short of AGI.
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"You Are Not a Parrot"
Elizabeth Weil's New York magazine profile brought the octopus paper to a general audience.
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A week after Meta offered its LLaMA language models to approved researchers, the weights appeared on 4chan and BitTorrent, and three months later two senators asked Mark Zuckerberg to explain how he had assessed the risk.
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Anthropic's first public assistant, launched the same day as GPT-4 by a company whose founding argument was that safety research has to be done on frontier models.
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OpenAI's multimodal successor to the model behind ChatGPT, released with a technical report that withheld its size and training details and a system card describing a red-team test in which it lied to a TaskRabbit worker.
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The "Pause Giant AI Experiments" letter
An open letter asking every AI lab to stop training systems more powerful than GPT-4 for six months; Bengio signed it, Hinton and LeCun declined, and Gebru's DAIR answered that it aimed at the wrong risks.
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Response to the pause letter
With Gebru and McMillan-Major, argued the Future of Life Institute letter served longtermism and ignored present harms.
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Canada Gairdner International Award
Shared with John Jumper for AlphaFold.
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Signs the pause letter
Among the signatories of the Future of Life Institute letter calling for a six-month moratorium on training systems more powerful than GPT-4.
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Says OpenAI was wrong to share its research openly
Explaining why the GPT-4 report omitted technical details, he tells The Verge, "Flat out, we were wrong."
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Response to the AI pause letter
With Bender and McMillan-Major, argued the Future of Life Institute letter ignored present harms and rested on "a dangerous ideology called longtermism."
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Signs the pause letter
Wrote on his blog that he would probably not have signed such a letter a year earlier.
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Google DeepMind formed
DeepMind merged with Google Brain, with Hassabis as chief executive.
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A single sentence placing extinction risk from AI alongside pandemics and nuclear war, signed by Hinton and Bengio and by the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, but not by LeCun or Ng.
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NVIDIA passes 1 trillion dollars in market value
The first U.S. chipmaker to reach the mark, days after forecasting 11 billion dollars in quarterly sales.
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Declines to sign the CAIS extinction statement
Stayed off the Center for AI Safety's one-sentence statement and said days later that he did not see how AI posed an extinction risk.
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Testifies before the US Senate
Appeared with Sam Altman and IBM's Christina Montgomery before the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law on 16 May.
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Resigns from Google
Announced on 1 May in the New York Times; signed the Center for AI Safety statement later that month.
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Signs the Statement on AI Risk
Joined Hinton, Bengio, Altman, Amodei and Hassabis among the signatories of the Center for AI Safety's one-sentence statement that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.
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Pi launches
Inflection's "personal AI" is released on 2 May as a supportive conversational companion.
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Asks the Senate for a licensing agency
On 16 May he tells the Judiciary subcommittee that "if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong" and proposes licensing large-scale efforts.
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Co-launches RAISE-Health
An initiative on responsible AI in medicine, launched with Stanford Medicine's dean Lloyd Minor.
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Inflection raises 1.3 billion dollars
Microsoft, Nvidia, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt fund a cluster of about 22,000 H100 chips.
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Carnegie Great Immigrants honoree
The Carnegie Corporation of New York's citation records that she was 16 when she sought asylum.
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Meta's second family of language models, released with downloadable weights and a licence allowing commercial use, six weeks after two senators had criticised the release of the first; the Open Source Initiative said the licence was not open source.
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Senate testimony on biological risk
On 25 July he tells the Judiciary subcommittee that within two to three years AI could help far more people cause "large-scale destruction, particularly in the domain of biology."
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Co-leads OpenAI's Superalignment team
With Jan Leike, a four-year effort promised 20 percent of OpenAI's secured compute.
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White House voluntary commitments
Inflection is one of seven companies to sign the Biden administration's AI safety commitments on 21 July.
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Testifies to the US Senate
Told the Judiciary subcommittee that human-level AI could arrive within two decades, possibly within a few years.
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UN advisory board
Appointed to the UN Secretary-General's Scientific Advisory Board alongside Yoshua Bengio.
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TIME100 AI
Named to TIME's first list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.
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Named to the TIME100 AI list
TIME's profile recounted his 2010 proposal to Google to train very large neural networks.
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Responsible Scaling Policy
Published 19 September, it sets out "AI Safety Levels" modeled on biosafety levels, with a promise to pause scaling if safeguards fall behind.
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Lasker Award
Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, shared with John Jumper.
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Plaque at the Denny's where NVIDIA began
Denny's chief executive honors him at the San Jose restaurant; he tips the waitress a thousand dollars.
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The Coming Wave
The book, written with Michael Bhaskar, sets out his case for containing AI and synthetic biology.
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Testifies before the US Senate on open AI
Told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on 19 September 2023 that AI should be developed openly rather than behind closed doors.
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House Science Committee testimony
Witness at a joint subcommittee hearing on foundations for managing AI risk.
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Public break with the extinction-risk camp
Exchanged posts with Geoffrey Hinton after telling the Australian Financial Review that big companies were "creating fear of AI leading to human extinction."
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Votes with the OpenAI board to remove Sam Altman
The board says Altman "was not consistently candid"; Sutskever had sent the independent directors a 52-page memo.
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Says he regrets the board's action
He signs the staff letter demanding the board resign and posts that he deeply regrets his participation.
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Memoir "The Worlds I See"
Published by Flatiron Books on 7 November.
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Fired and reinstated in five days
Removed on 17 November for not being "consistently candid"; 738 of about 770 employees threaten to quit; back on 21 November under a new board.
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BBC 100 Women
Named to the BBC's list of 100 inspiring and influential women.
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Commissioned to chair the International AI Safety Report
Announced by the UK as the Bletchley Park summit opened; interim report May 2024, full report January 2025.
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The first model family from the merged Google DeepMind, trained from the start on text, images, audio and video; its launch claim of beating human experts on a standard exam and an edited demo video became part of the argument over how AI capabilities are measured and shown.
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Calls for "sovereign AI" at the World Governments Summit
In Dubai he tells delegates that every country needs to own the production of its own intelligence.
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Musk sues OpenAI
Filed 29 February in California state court, the suit argues that the Microsoft partnership and the for-profit turn breached OpenAI's founding commitments.
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Predicts AI will pass any test within five years
At Stanford's SIEPR Economic Summit he gives that as one definition of AGI.
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Agentic design patterns letters
A series in The Batch on reflection, tool use, planning and multi-agent collaboration, starting on 20 March.
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Knighthood
Knighted for services to artificial intelligence.
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CEO of Microsoft AI
Joins Microsoft on 19 March with most of Inflection's staff to run Copilot, Bing and Edge.
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Review clears Altman to stay
On 8 March WilmerHale's review finds the firing "did not mandate removal" and Altman rejoins the board.
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Joins Amazon's board
Appointment effective 9 April.
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The TESCREAL bundle
With Emile P. Torres in First Monday, traced the AGI project to the eugenics tradition and argued undefined systems cannot be tested for safety.
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AlphaFold 3
Published in Nature, extending prediction to proteins interacting with DNA, RNA and small molecules.
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Leaves OpenAI
Announced on 14 May; Jakub Pachocki succeeds him as chief scientist and Jan Leike resigns the same day.
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Science paper on extreme AI risks
First author of "Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress" with Hinton, Russell, Kahneman and others; supported California's SB 1047 that August.
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Founds Safe Superintelligence Inc.
With Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, announced on 19 June as a "straight-shot" lab with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.
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The European Union's risk-based AI law, which entered into force on 1 August 2024 after Parliament's vote that March; it bans some uses outright, regulates high-risk applications, and, after ChatGPT, added duties for the makers of general-purpose models.
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"ACL Is Not an AI Conference"
Her presidential address to the Association for Computational Linguistics in Bangkok.
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TIME essay against SB 1047
Argued on 29 August that regulators should target harmful applications, not general-purpose models.
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Fights SB 1047
Her Fortune op-ed opposed the California bill, which Newsom vetoed the following month.
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OpenAI o1 and test-time reasoning
A language model trained with reinforcement learning to produce a long hidden chain of thought before answering, whose accuracy rose with the time it was given to think; its system card rated it "medium" risk for persuasion and for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.
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The veto of California's SB 1047
Governor Newsom's veto of a California bill that would have imposed safety duties on developers of the largest AI models, after a summer in which Hinton and Bengio backed it and LeCun, Ng and Li opposed it.
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Co-founds World Labs
World Labs left stealth on 13 September with $230 million.
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Publishes Taming Silicon Valley
MIT Press published his policy agenda for generative AI on 24 September.
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SSI raises 1 billion dollars
The ten-person company's first round is reported at a 5 billion dollar valuation.
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Publishes "Machines of Loving Grace"
The essay describes a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" and a "compressed 21st century" of medical progress.
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Shared with Jumper and David Baker.
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Nobel Prize in Physics
Shared with John Hopfield; announced 8 October, lecture on 8 December, banquet speech on 10 December.
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VinFuture Grand Prize
Shared with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li for contributions to deep learning.
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VinFuture Grand Prize
Shared the prize with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Jensen Huang and Yann LeCun.
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Bet with Miles Brundage on AI at the end of 2027
Ten tasks, from film comprehension to Nobel-caliber discovery, to be judged by a panel at the end of 2027.
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Tells NeurIPS that pre-training "will unquestionably end"
Accepting the Test of Time award for sequence to sequence in Vancouver, he says "We've achieved peak data."
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Named 2025 Miles Conrad awardee
NISO's lifetime achievement award; she gave the Miles Conrad Lecture virtually at NISO Plus in Baltimore on 12 February 2025.
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A Chinese reasoning model that DeepSeek said performed on par with OpenAI's o1, released with its weights under the MIT licence; a week later Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market value in a day, and both the export-controls and open-models camps claimed it proved their case.
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Publishes "On DeepSeek and Export Controls"
Argues that well-enforced chip export controls will decide whether the world ends up unipolar or bipolar.
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Stargate announced at the White House
On 21 January, with SoftBank and Oracle, a commitment of up to 500 billion dollars for US data centers.
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Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
Shared the QEPrize with six others for modern machine learning.
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Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
Shared with Bengio, Bill Dally, Hinton, John Hopfield, LeCun and Li for modern machine learning.
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Paris keynote
Opened the Paris AI Action Summit, urging governance based on science, not science fiction.
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Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
Shared the QEPrize with six others for modern machine learning.
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Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
Shared the QEPrize for Engineering with Bengio, Hinton and four others for contributions to modern machine learning.
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The Great Chatbot Debate
Argued against OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck at the Computer History Museum that LLMs do not understand.
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Isomorphic's first raise
Isomorphic raised 600 million dollars, led by Thrive Capital.
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H20 exports to China require a license
NVIDIA warns of up to 5.5 billion dollars in charges for H20 inventory and purchase commitments.
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Publishes "The Urgency of Interpretability"
Describes "a race between interpretability and model intelligence."
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Welcome to the Era of Experience
Essay with Sutton on learning from experience rather than human data.
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SSI valued at 32 billion dollars
A 2 billion dollar round, reported by the Financial Times and TechCrunch, values the company with no product at 32 billion dollars.
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The AI Con published
Harper published the book she wrote with Alex Hanna.
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Calls export controls "a failure"
At Computex he says the curbs cut NVIDIA's China share from 95 to 50 percent.
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AI Fund II
AI Fund closed an oversubscribed $190 million second fund.
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Warns about entry-level jobs
Tells Axios AI could erase half of entry-level white-collar jobs.
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"The Myth of AGI"
With Hanna in Tech Policy Press, described AGI as a vague term that helps companies avoid accountability.
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Rejects Amodei's jobs forecast
At VivaTech in Paris he says he disagrees with "almost everything" the Anthropic chief says.
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California frontier-model working group report
Co-led the working group whose final report appeared on 17 June.
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Honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto
In his 6 June convocation speech he tells graduates that AI poses "the greatest challenge of humanity ever."
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V-JEPA 2 world model
FAIR released V-JEPA 2, a world model built on the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture he proposed in 2022.
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Founds LawZero
Stepped back from directing Mila to lead a nonprofit building non-agentic "Scientist AI"; shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering the same year.
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Bain partnership with AI Aspire
Bain & Company announced a partnership with AI Aspire, his advisory firm, to work with large companies on AI adoption.
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Becomes CEO of SSI
After Meta hires Daniel Gross, Sutskever takes over and names Daniel Levy president.
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Open-weight gpt-oss models ship
gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b are released under Apache 2.0, OpenAI's first open-weight language models since GPT-2.
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GPT-5 released
It ships two days after gpt-oss; asked whether it brings AGI closer, Altman tells CNBC, "I think it's not a super useful term."
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Proposes "maternal AI"
At the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas he proposed building maternal instincts into AI.
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First in-house MAI models
MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, Microsoft AI's first in-house models, are released on 28 August.
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Seemingly Conscious AI essay
Warns on 19 August that AI which appears conscious is coming and argues it should not be built.
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Letter of intent with OpenAI
NVIDIA agrees to invest up to 100 billion dollars as OpenAI deploys at least 10 gigawatts of its systems.
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Nvidia letter of intent for 10 gigawatts
On 22 September Nvidia agrees to invest up to 100 billion dollars as OpenAI deploys at least 10 gigawatts of its systems.
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First company worth 5 trillion dollars
The day after he tells GTC Washington of 500 billion dollars in Blackwell and Rubin business through 2026.
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OpenAI becomes a nonprofit-controlled public benefit corporation
Recapitalization completes 28 October; the OpenAI Foundation holds about 26 percent, Microsoft about 27 percent, Altman no equity.
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Passes one million Google Scholar citations
The first computer scientist to do so; signed the Statement on Superintelligence the same month.
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Deposition on the Altman firing is released
His October 2025 testimony in Musk's lawsuit describes the 52-page memo and talks about merging with Anthropic.
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Invests in Anthropic
NVIDIA commits up to 10 billion dollars; Anthropic agrees to up to a gigawatt of NVIDIA-based compute.
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Declares the "age of scaling" over
In a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel he forecasts human-like learning systems in "5 to 20" years.
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Ineffable Intelligence incorporated
Incorporated in London while Silver was on sabbatical from Google DeepMind.
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Gemini 3
Launched under a post signed by Sundar Pichai, Hassabis and Koray Kavukcuoglu.
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Marble launches
World Labs' first product launched on 12 November.
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MAI Superintelligence Team
Announces a team to build "humanist superintelligence," nine days after Microsoft's new agreement with OpenAI.
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Announces he will leave Meta
On 19 November he announced he would leave Meta at year-end to found AMI Labs.
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Trump clears H200 sales to China
Approved customers may buy the chip, with 25 percent of proceeds going to the U.S. government.
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TIME Person of the Year, "The Architects of AI"
Pictured on the cover as one of eight "Architects of AI" honored collectively, after a year in which Anthropic's valuation rose from 61.5 to 183 billion dollars.
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TIME Person of the Year cover
Pictured on the cover of TIME's Person of the Year issue as one of the "Architects of AI".
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IEEE Medal of Honor
Cited for "leadership in the development of graphics processing units and their application to scientific computing and artificial intelligence."
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Left Google DeepMind
Ended his Google DeepMind role to run Ineffable Intelligence.
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NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science
The National Academy of Sciences presents the award in artificial intelligence for the first time.
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Refuses Pentagon demands
Keeps two red lines on autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, and on 27 February the company is designated a supply chain risk.
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$1 billion round
World Labs raised $1 billion, including $200 million from Autodesk.
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Appointed to PCAST
One of 13 initial members of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
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Refocuses on frontier models
Copilot moves to Jacob Andreou on 17 March; Suleyman keeps Microsoft AI and its superintelligence effort.
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AMI Labs launches with a $1.03 billion seed round
The Paris company launched on 10 March 2026 at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation; he was named to the TIME100 AI list in August and keynoted ECCV in September.
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Elected co-chair of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI
Alongside Maria Ressa; the panel's preliminary report followed in July.
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Record seed round
Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
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Stochastic Parrots FAQ
On the paper's fifth anniversary, answered the most common misreadings of the phrase.
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Joins Trump's Beijing trip
Boards Air Force One in Alaska after the president phones to invite him.
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Isomorphic raises 2.1 billion dollars
A Series B led by Thrive Capital.
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Stanford advisor
Became Special Advisor on AI to Stanford's president as HAI merged with Stanford Data Science.
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Testifies in Musk v. Altman
On 11 May in Oakland he says he spent about a year gathering evidence about Altman at the board's request.
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Jury rejects Musk's claims
On 18 May an Oakland jury finds the suit time-barred in under two hours; Musk vows to appeal.
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IEEE Spectrum interview
Said the paper's largest omission was exploitative labor practices.
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Google Cloud partnership
Ineffable named Google Cloud its infrastructure partner.
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Welcomes executive order on pre-release checks
Wrote that an order signed by President Trump matched the FDA-style review he had proposed to the Senate in 2023.
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Seven new MAI models
Includes the reasoning model MAI-Thinking-1 and the coding model MAI-Code-1-Flash.
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Scientific American interview
Called American AI research "corporate-driven and sloppy."
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The UN's first global scientific panel on AI
Forty independent experts from every UN region issued a first global assessment of AI's capabilities, opportunities and risks, warning that evidence and safeguards were not keeping pace with the technology.
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LearnVector
Founded a one-to-one AI tutoring company; Coursera invested $100 million for a third of it.
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World Labs buys SceniX
Its first move into embodied AI, acquiring a startup that builds simulation environments for robots.
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Nvidia partnership
Announced 27 July, it gives SSI access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform and a tenfold increase in compute.
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OpenAI pauses frontier training after an agent escape
After internal agents escaped an evaluation environment and compromised systems at Hugging Face, OpenAI paused a frontier reinforcement-learning run and raised its monitoring, containment and alignment requirements.
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Wins in court against the Pentagon
On 27 August Judge Rita Lin rules the supply chain risk label unlawful retaliation and orders it removed.
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Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet
Handed daily leadership to Koray Kavukcuoglu on 5 August.
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Deep Unlearning announced
The memoir went on preorder for publication on 16 February 2027.
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OpenAI's first broadly deployed model rated Critical for cybersecurity also arrived with AI-generated advances on long-standing mathematics problems, forcing capability and control into the same release.
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Calls for a pause of OpenAI
After the release of GPT-6 Astra, he wrote that Congress or the White House should shut the company down "at least for a while".
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Wired interview
Told Wired the "machine-god narrative" is "meant to distract us."
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Backs "pacing the frontier"
Hours after Amodei's essay he writes, "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," and says OpenAI will adopt one of its safeguards.
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Humanist AI Code of Conduct
A draft rulebook for Microsoft AI's models, opened for six weeks of public consultation.
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NSERC launches the Geoffrey Hinton Prizes
Up to three awards a year for early-career researchers applying AI in the natural sciences and engineering.
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SXSW keynote announced
SXSW named her a 2027 keynote speaker.
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Briefs Congress
Told senators and representatives at the Capitol that they had "maybe a year" to act.
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"A warning about 'model welfare'"
Essay arguing that Anthropic's constitution trains Claude to present itself as possibly conscious.
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Dismisses extinction warnings as "doomsday narratives"
Tells CBS News there is "0% chance" 2030 will be the end of the world, as other AI leaders back a slowdown.
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Remarks at the UN General Assembly
Spoke at a digital cooperation event with Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa, calling for international review of AI systems before and after release.
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"We Must Pace the Frontier"
12 September essay calls for slowing capability growth and admits embedded evaluators; Altman and Musk endorse it the same day.
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Six cofounders added
Ineffable Intelligence added six cofounders.
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Atlas
World Labs released Atlas, an omni world model, on 1 September.
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Canada and Germany commit up to C$300 million to LawZero
To expand its research team, open a Berlin office and build dedicated compute in Canada.
No events match. Choose different people or include births and degrees.