AI in 2019
4 events, oldest first. Each links to a page with details and sources.
- OpenAI announces GPT-2 and withholds the full model over misuse concerns ★★★★
GPT-2, a 1.5B-parameter language model trained on 40GB of web text, generated strikingly coherent paragraphs; OpenAI initially released only smaller versions, citing misuse risk, and released the full model in November 2019.
- Rich Sutton publishes "The Bitter Lesson": general methods that scale with compute win ★★★★
On March 13, 2019 reinforcement-learning pioneer Rich Sutton published the short essay "The Bitter Lesson". It argues that the biggest lesson of 70 years of AI research is that general methods leveraging computation (search and learning) ultimately beat approaches that build in human knowledge…
- Hinton, LeCun and Bengio receive the Turing Award for deep learning ★★★
The ACM awarded the 2018 A.M. Turing Award to Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, the 'godfathers of deep learning', for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
- Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI ★★★
Microsoft invested $1B in OpenAI and became its exclusive cloud provider, months after OpenAI created a 'capped-profit' entity; the partnership later expanded with a multi-billion investment in January 2023.