Milestones and achievements in artificial intelligence
A sourced timeline of 249 documented AI milestones from 1950 to 2024. Every achievement recorded here carries at least two sources, one of them primary, and a date given only to the precision the evidence supports.
Recent milestones
Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are awarded for machine learning
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton on 8 October for foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks. The Chemistry prize followed the next day, half to David Baker for computational protein design and half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction.
OpenAI releases o1, a model trained to reason before answering
OpenAI released o1-preview and o1-mini on 12 September 2024, models trained by reinforcement learning to produce an extended chain of thought before answering. On the 2024 AIME examination GPT-4o averaged 12 per cent of problems; o1 averaged 74 per cent with a single attempt and 93 per cent when re-ranking a thousand samples.
The EU Artificial Intelligence Act enters into force
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 entered into force on 1 August 2024, twenty days after publication in the Official Journal. It is the first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence adopted anywhere, sorting systems into risk tiers and attaching obligations that scale with the harm a system could do.
GPT-4o handles speech, vision and text in one network
OpenAI released GPT-4o on 13 May 2024, trained end to end across text, vision and audio so that every input and output passes through one network. It responds to speech in as little as 232 milliseconds and 320 on average, against roughly 2.8 seconds for the three separate models it replaced.
AlphaFold 3 predicts how proteins interact with DNA, RNA and drugs
Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs published AlphaFold 3 in Nature on 8 May 2024. Where AlphaFold 2 predicted the shape of a protein, this predicts the joint structure of complexes containing proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules and ions, using a diffusion architecture that produces atom coordinates directly.
Mixtral 8x7B: sparse mixture-of-experts model released under Apache 2.0
Mixtral 8x7B, a sparse mixture-of-experts language model, was published in January 2024. It outperforms or matches Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 on most evaluated benchmarks while using only 13B active parameters per token, and both base and instruction-tuned versions were released under the Apache 2.0 licence.
GNoME predicts 2.2 million crystal structures, and the claim is disputed
Google DeepMind published GNoME in Nature on 29 November 2023, reporting 2.2 million predicted crystal structures of which 381,000 were judged stable, and describing this as an order of magnitude expansion in the stable materials known. A companion paper from Berkeley Lab reported a robotic laboratory synthesising 41 of the predicted compounds.
GraphCast forecasts ten days of global weather in under a minute
Google DeepMind published GraphCast in Science on 14 November 2023. Trained on about forty years of reanalysis data, it predicts hundreds of atmospheric variables ten days ahead at quarter-degree resolution, and beat the European Centre's operational forecast on 90 per cent of 1,380 verification targets. A forecast that takes hours on a supercomputer takes it under a minute.
AlphaMissense scores every possible missense variant in the human proteome
Google DeepMind published AlphaMissense in Science on 19 September 2023, an adaptation of AlphaFold that scores how likely a single amino acid change is to cause disease. It classified 89 per cent of all 71 million possible missense variants, against roughly 0.1 per cent confirmed by laboratory or clinical work.
3D Gaussian Splatting achieves real-time novel-view synthesis at 1080p
Bernhard Kerbl and colleagues applied 3D Gaussian splatting to novel-view synthesis with end-to-end optimisation and adaptive density control, achieving high-quality results at 1080p resolution and real-time frame rates, without the slow neural rendering that previous approaches required.
FlashAttention-2 roughly doubles attention speed on A100 GPUs
Tri Dao's FlashAttention-2 improved GPU work partitioning to deliver roughly 2x the speed of FlashAttention, reaching 50–73% of the theoretical maximum FLOPs/s in the configurations benchmarked in the paper, and up to 225 TFLOPs/s per A100 in the specific GPT-style training configurations reported.
RFdiffusion designs proteins that do not exist in nature
Watson, Juergens and colleagues at the Baker Lab published RFdiffusion in Nature on 11 July 2023. By fine-tuning the RoseTTAFold prediction network on denoising tasks, they turned a model that reads protein structures into one that invents them. Hundreds of the designs were then made in the laboratory.
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By field
How this is put together
Every claim here is sourced. Across 249 entries there are 632 citations, and 288 of the researchers involved have their own page. Dates are given only to the precision the evidence supports, so an entry reads 1958 rather than inventing a day nobody recorded. Where a first-of-its-kind claim did not survive checking, the entry says so and names the earlier example.
The whole corpus is available as JSON under CC BY-NC 4.0. Corrections are welcome and credited: tell us what is wrong.