Milestones and achievements in artificial intelligence
A sourced timeline of 234 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.
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.
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.
Process supervision outperforms outcome supervision for LLM reasoning
Researchers showed that giving a model step-by-step feedback on its reasoning, rather than judging only the final answer, raised the solve rate to 78% on a representative subset of the MATH benchmark, and released 800,000 human feedback labels to support further work.
Direct Preference Optimisation reduces need for RL in LM alignment
Rafael Rafailov and colleagues introduced Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a method that aligns language models with human preferences using only a simple classification loss, bypassing the complex reinforcement learning pipeline that existing approaches required.
QLoRA enables finetuning of 65B-parameter models on a single 48GB GPU
Tim Dettmers and colleagues showed that a 65-billion-parameter language model could be finetuned on a single 48GB GPU without measurable quality loss on the benchmarks tested, by combining 4-bit quantisation with low-rank adapter training.
LLaMA matches leading models on public data with far fewer parameters
LLaMA, a collection of foundation language models from 7B to 65B parameters trained exclusively on publicly available data, was submitted to arXiv on 27 February 2023. The 13B model outperformed GPT-3 at 175B parameters on most benchmarks, and the weights were released to the research community.
ControlNet adds structured spatial conditioning to pretrained text-to-image diffusion models
Lvmin Zhang, Anyi Rao and Maneesh Agrawala introduced ControlNet, a neural network architecture that adds spatial conditioning controls such as edges, depth, segmentation and human pose to large pretrained text-to-image diffusion models without degrading their existing capabilities.
Self-Instruct: language models taught to follow instructions using synthetic self-generated data
Yizhong Wang and colleagues introduced Self-Instruct, a method for training language models to follow instructions using synthetic data the models generate themselves, closing much of the gap with InstructGPT-001 on evaluated tasks while using far less human annotation.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT as a free research preview
OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 as a free research preview built on GPT-3.5. It reached one million users within five days, and analysts at UBS estimated roughly 100 million monthly users by January 2023, a pace that had taken TikTok nine months and Instagram about two and a half years.
BLOOM: open-access 176B-parameter multilingual language model
The BigScience Workshop released BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter language model trained across 46 natural and 13 programming languages, made freely available under the Responsible AI License at a scale that had only recently begun to become accessible, and had not previously been available with multilingual training data.
By decade
By field
How this is put together
Every claim here is sourced. Across 234 entries there are 593 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.