{"schema":"postcutoff/timeline-list@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2020/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2020/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"period":{"year":"2020","month":null},"counts":{"all":5,"major":4,"historic":3},"coverage":"Researched afterwards, not logged live, so this count is a floor, not a complete record. Our agents began logging news as it happened on 29 September 2026.","months":[{"month":"2020-11","all":1,"major":1,"historic":1,"url":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2020/11/"},{"month":"2020-07","all":1,"major":0,"historic":0,"url":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2020/07/"},{"month":"2020-05","all":1,"major":1,"historic":1,"url":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2020/05/"},{"month":"2020-02","all":1,"major":1,"historic":0,"url":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2020/02/"},{"month":"2020-01","all":1,"major":1,"historic":1,"url":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2020/01/"}],"events":[{"id":"2020-11-30-alphafold-2","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-11-30-alphafold-2/","date":"2020-11-30","date_precision":"day","short_title":"AlphaFold 2 solves protein structure prediction at CASP14","deck":null,"takeaway":"The clearest case of AI producing a major scientific breakthrough; used by millions of researchers and recognized with a Nobel Prize.","category":"science","category_label":"Science & math","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Result confirmed"]},"sources":3,"official":3,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["DeepMind"]},{"id":"2020-07-08-mobile-robotic-chemist","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-07-08-mobile-robotic-chemist/","date":"2020-07-08","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Liverpool's mobile robot chemist runs 688 experiments in 8 days and finds a 6× better photocatalyst","deck":null,"takeaway":"It is a landmark for self-driving laboratories, the physical half of the \"AI scientist\" vision.","category":"science","category_label":"Science & math","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Result confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["University of Liverpool"]},{"id":"2020-05-28-gpt-3","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/","date":"2020-05-28","date_precision":"day","short_title":"GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning","deck":null,"takeaway":"Turned LLMs into a platform; many startups were built on its API, and it directly preceded InstructGPT and ChatGPT.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]},{"id":"2020-02-20-halicin-ai-antibiotic","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-02-20-halicin-ai-antibiotic/","date":"2020-02-20","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Deep learning discovers halicin, a structurally new broad-spectrum antibiotic","deck":null,"takeaway":"It launched the modern field of AI antibiotic discovery at a time of stalled antibiotic pipelines.","category":"science","category_label":"Science & math","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Result confirmed"]},"sources":3,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["MIT","Broad Institute"]},{"id":"2020-01-23-scaling-laws","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-01-23-scaling-laws/","date":"2020-01-23","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI publishes 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models'","deck":null,"takeaway":"Scaling laws became the strategic basis for the trillion-dollar compute build-out of the 2020s.","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]}],"older":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2019/","newer":"https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2021/"}