AI milestones in 2015
5 documented milestones from 2015.
OpenAI Founded
In December 2015, a group of technology investors and researchers (including Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman) announced the founding of OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory in San Francisco, with approximately one billion US dollars in pledged funding.
Andrew M. Dai and Quoc V. Le Introduced Semi-Supervised Sequence Learning
In November 2015, Andrew M. Dai and Quoc V. Le at Google Brain published 'Semi-Supervised Sequence Learning', showing that pre-training recurrent neural networks with unsupervised objectives, language modelling or sequence autoencoding, before supervised fine-tuning improved text classification accuracy and training stability, anticipating the pre-train-then-fine-tune paradigm later adopted widely in NLP.
Blue Brain Project Digital Reconstruction of the Rat Somatosensory Cortex Microcircuitry
On 8 October 2015, Henry Markram and colleagues at the Blue Brain Project published a detailed computational reconstruction of 31,000 neurons and 37 million synapses in a 0.29 mm³ column of juvenile rat somatosensory cortex, creating the first large-scale digital model of a mammalian cortical microcircuit.
Moley Robotics Demonstrates Robotic Kitchen System at Hannover Messe
In April 2015, London-based Moley Robotics unveiled a prototype robotic kitchen system at Hannover Messe, comprising a pair of dexterous robotic arms capable of replicating recorded human cooking movements, integrated with an oven, hob, and dishwasher in a fitted kitchen unit.
Neurorobotics Platform, Human Brain Project
In 2015, the Human Brain Project, a European Commission Flagship Initiative, released its Neurorobotics Platform, a simulation environment allowing researchers to connect large-scale brain models to virtual robot bodies and run closed-loop cognitive experiments without physical hardware.