As of: 2026-10-10 23:43 CEST. Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code). Human editor: Adam Bicz. Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/news/major/7/ # Major AI news, newest first, page 7 The 332 major or historic events of 1,141 in the log, newest first. Page 7 of 7, 50 events per page, grouped by the day each event happened. ## Tuesday 5 January 2021 - [OpenAI unveils DALL·E and CLIP](https://postcutoff.com/e/2021-01-05-dall-e-clip/) (Media generation; OpenAI; major). Launched the text-to-image era and made natural language the interface for vision models. Source: https://openai.com/index/dall-e/ ## Monday 30 November 2020 - [AlphaFold 2 solves protein structure prediction at CASP14](https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-11-30-alphafold-2/) (Science & math; DeepMind; historic). The clearest case of AI producing a major scientific breakthrough; used by millions of researchers and recognized with a Nobel Prize. Source: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology/ ## Thursday 28 May 2020 - [GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning](https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/) (Model releases; OpenAI; historic). Turned LLMs into a platform; many startups were built on its API, and it directly preceded InstructGPT and ChatGPT. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 ## Thursday 20 February 2020 - [Deep learning discovers halicin, a structurally new broad-spectrum antibiotic](https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-02-20-halicin-ai-antibiotic/) (Science & math; MIT, Broad Institute; major). It launched the modern field of AI antibiotic discovery at a time of stalled antibiotic pipelines. Source: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30102-1 ## Thursday 23 January 2020 - [OpenAI publishes 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models'](https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-01-23-scaling-laws/) (Research; OpenAI; historic). Scaling laws became the strategic basis for the trillion-dollar compute build-out of the 2020s. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 ## Wednesday 13 March 2019 - [Rich Sutton publishes "The Bitter Lesson"](https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-03-13-sutton-bitter-lesson/) (Research; University of Alberta, DeepMind; major). On March 13, 2019 reinforcement-learning pioneer Rich Sutton published the short essay "The Bitter Lesson". Source: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html ## Thursday 14 February 2019 - [OpenAI announces GPT-2 and withholds the full model over misuse concerns](https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-02-14-gpt-2/) (Model releases; OpenAI; major). First public glimpse of what scaling LLMs could do and the first major debate over whether to release model weights. Source: https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ ## Sunday 2 December 2018 - [AlphaFold (v1) tops the CASP13 protein-structure prediction assessment](https://postcutoff.com/e/2018-12-02-alphafold-1-casp13/) (Science & math; DeepMind; major). Marked AI's entry into a grand challenge of biology and set up the 2020 AlphaFold 2 breakthrough. Source: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1923-7 ## Thursday 11 October 2018 - [Google releases BERT, bidirectional Transformer pre-training](https://postcutoff.com/e/2018-10-11-bert/) (Model releases; Google AI Language; major). Triggered the 'ImageNet moment' of NLP: pre-trained Transformers became the default for all language tasks. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 ## Monday 11 June 2018 - [OpenAI's GPT-1: generative pre-training of Transformers](https://postcutoff.com/e/2018-06-11-gpt-1/) (Model releases; OpenAI; major). Established the pre-train-then-adapt paradigm and the decoder-only Transformer lineage that led to ChatGPT. Source: https://openai.com/index/language-unsupervised/ ## Tuesday 5 December 2017 - [AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero master games through pure self-play](https://postcutoff.com/e/2017-12-05-alphazero/) (Research; DeepMind; historic). Proved that learning from self-generated experience can exceed human knowledge — an idea that resurfaced in RL-trained reasoning models (o1, R1) in 2024–2025. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815 ## Monday 12 June 2017 - ['Attention Is All You Need' introduces the Transformer](https://postcutoff.com/e/2017-06-12-transformer/) (Research; Google Brain, Google Research; historic). Arguably the most consequential AI paper of the century so far: the Transformer's scalability made LLMs, multimodal models and AlphaFold 2 possible. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ## Tuesday 15 March 2016 - [AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol 4–1 at Go](https://postcutoff.com/e/2016-03-15-alphago-lee-sedol/) (Milestones; Google DeepMind; historic). A watershed for deep reinforcement learning and a 'Sputnik moment' that spurred massive AI investment, particularly in China. Source: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16961 ## Friday 11 December 2015 - [OpenAI founded as a non-profit AI research lab](https://postcutoff.com/e/2015-12-11-openai-founded/) (Business; OpenAI; major). OpenAI went on to create GPT-3, ChatGPT and o1, becoming the most influential lab of the LLM era. Source: https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/ ## Thursday 10 December 2015 - [ResNet: residual learning enables very deep networks](https://postcutoff.com/e/2015-12-10-resnet/) (Research; Microsoft Research; major). Residual connections are a universal ingredient of deep learning; every Transformer block uses them. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385 ## Wednesday 10 September 2014 - [Sequence-to-sequence learning and neural attention](https://postcutoff.com/e/2014-09-10-seq2seq-attention/) (Research; Google, Université de Montréal; major). Established the encoder–decoder paradigm and attention — the direct precursors of the Transformer and modern LLMs. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215 ## Tuesday 10 June 2014 - [Ian Goodfellow introduces Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)](https://postcutoff.com/e/2014-06-10-generative-adversarial-networks/) (Research; Université de Montréal; major). The first generative approach to produce convincingly realistic images, it opened the modern era of AI media generation. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661 ## Thursday 19 December 2013 - [DeepMind's DQN learns to play Atari games from pixels](https://postcutoff.com/e/2013-12-19-dqn-atari/) (Research; DeepMind; major). Launched deep reinforcement learning as a field and put DeepMind on the path to AlphaGo. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602 ## Wednesday 16 January 2013 - [word2vec: efficient word embeddings from Google](https://postcutoff.com/e/2013-01-16-word2vec/) (Research; Google; major). Popularized learned embeddings, a core building block of all subsequent NLP including Transformers and LLMs. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781 ## Sunday 30 September 2012 - [AlexNet wins ImageNet challenge, igniting the deep learning boom](https://postcutoff.com/e/2012-09-30-alexnet/) (Research; University of Toronto; historic). The single event most often cited as the start of the modern AI era: it established GPUs + big data + deep nets as the winning recipe and made NVIDIA central to AI. Source: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Abstract.html ## Wednesday 16 February 2011 - [IBM Watson wins Jeopardy! against human champions](https://postcutoff.com/e/2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy/) (Milestones; IBM; major). A high-profile demonstration of open-domain question answering, a decade before LLMs made such capabilities general-purpose. Source: https://www.ibm.com/history/watson-jeopardy ## June 2009, day not recorded - [ImageNet dataset presented at CVPR 2009](https://postcutoff.com/e/2009-06-20-imagenet/) (Benchmarks; Princeton University, Stanford University; historic). Showed that data scale was a key ingredient of progress; AlexNet's 2012 ImageNet win kicked off the deep learning era. Source: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2009.5206848 ## July 2006, day not recorded - [Hinton's deep belief nets launch the 'deep learning' revival](https://postcutoff.com/e/2006-07-01-deep-belief-networks/) (Research; University of Toronto; major). It rebranded neural networks as 'deep learning' and set the stage for the GPU-powered breakthroughs of 2009–2012. Source: https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.2006.18.7.1527 ## November 1997, day not recorded - [Hochreiter & Schmidhuber introduce Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)](https://postcutoff.com/e/1997-11-15-lstm/) (Research; TU Munich, IDSIA; major). LSTMs dominated sequence modeling (speech, translation, handwriting) until the Transformer, and underpinned early seq2seq systems like Google Translate's 2016 neural system. Source: https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735 ## Sunday 11 May 1997 - [IBM Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov](https://postcutoff.com/e/1997-05-11-deep-blue-kasparov/) (Milestones; IBM; historic). A landmark public moment for AI, though achieved by specialized search rather than learning — a contrast with AlphaGo/AlphaZero two decades later. Source: https://www.ibm.com/history/deep-blue ## 1989, date not recorded - [LeCun applies backprop-trained convolutional nets to handwritten digits](https://postcutoff.com/e/1989-12-01-lecun-convolutional-networks/) (Research; AT&T Bell Labs; major). Convolutional networks became the backbone of computer vision and the architecture that triggered the deep learning revolution in 2012. Source: https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.1989.1.4.541 ## Thursday 9 October 1986 - [Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams popularize backpropagation](https://postcutoff.com/e/1986-10-09-backpropagation/) (Research; UC San Diego, Carnegie Mellon University; historic). Backpropagation is still how essentially all neural networks, including today's LLMs, are trained. Source: https://doi.org/10.1038/323533a0 ## January 1966, day not recorded - [ELIZA, the first chatbot, published by Joseph Weizenbaum](https://postcutoff.com/e/1966-01-01-eliza/) (Research; MIT; major). The first chatbot, and the first vivid demonstration that humans readily anthropomorphize conversational software — a lesson that became central again with ChatGPT. Source: https://doi.org/10.1145/365153.365168 ## July 1958, day not recorded - [Frank Rosenblatt's Perceptron, the first trainable neural network](https://postcutoff.com/e/1958-07-01-perceptron/) (Research; Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, US Office of Naval Research; historic). It was the first learning neural network and the direct ancestor of modern deep learning; the hype and later backlash around it foreshadowed later AI boom-bust cycles. Source: https://doi.org/10.1037/h0042519 ## June 1956, day not recorded - [Dartmouth Summer Research Project coins 'artificial intelligence'](https://postcutoff.com/e/1956-06-01-dartmouth-workshop/) (Milestones; Dartmouth College; historic). It named the field, set its ambitions, and gathered the people who led AI research for decades. Source: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf ## October 1950, day not recorded - [Alan Turing proposes the 'imitation game' (Turing test)](https://postcutoff.com/e/1950-10-01-turing-computing-machinery-intelligence/) (Research; University of Manchester; historic). The Turing test became the most famous benchmark in AI's popular imagination and framed debates about machine intelligence for 70+ years; LLMs revived the debate in the 2020s. Source: https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433 ## December 1943, day not recorded - [McCulloch & Pitts publish the first mathematical model of a neural network](https://postcutoff.com/e/1943-12-01-mcculloch-pitts-neuron/) (Research; University of Illinois, University of Chicago; historic). It is the conceptual ancestor of every neural network used today, linking brain science, logic and computation. 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