AI milestones in 2024
6 documented milestones from 2024.
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.