AI in 2017
3 events, oldest first. Each links to a page with details and sources.
- 'Attention Is All You Need' introduces the Transformer ★★★★★
Vaswani et al. proposed the Transformer, an architecture built entirely on self-attention without recurrence; it became the foundation of BERT, GPT and virtually every modern large AI model.
- Andrej Karpathy's essay "Software 2.0": neural networks as a new way to write software ★★★
On Nov 11, 2017 Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla's director of AI, published "Software 2.0" on Medium. It argues that neural networks are not just another classifier but a new software stack: humans specify goals and curate datasets, and optimization writes the program (the weights). The framing shaped…
- AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero master games through pure self-play ★★★★★
AlphaGo Zero (Nature, October 2017) learned Go from scratch with no human games and beat the version that defeated Lee Sedol 100–0; AlphaZero (December 2017) generalized the method to chess and shogi.