AI in 2023
24 events, oldest first. Each links to a page with details and sources.
- Meta releases LLaMA, sparking the open-weights LLM wave ★★★★★
Meta released LLaMA (7B–65B) to researchers; LLaMA-13B outperformed GPT-3 on most benchmarks, and after the weights leaked in early March the model seeded a vast open-source ecosystem (Alpaca, Vicuna, llama.cpp).
- OpenAI releases GPT-4 ★★★★★
GPT-4, a large multimodal model accepting image and text input, reached human-level performance on many professional and academic exams, such as a simulated bar exam around the top 10% of test takers.
- Anthropic releases Claude ★★★★
Anthropic opened access to Claude, its AI assistant trained with Constitutional AI, in two versions: Claude and the faster, cheaper Claude Instant.
- Future of Life Institute open letter calls for a 6-month pause on training AI more powerful than GPT-4 ★★★★
On March 22, 2023, a week after GPT-4's release, the Future of Life Institute published "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter". It calls on all AI labs to immediately pause, for at least six months, the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, and on governments to impose a…
- Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google so he can speak freely about AI risks ★★★★
On May 1, 2023 The New York Times reported that Geoffrey Hinton, the deep-learning pioneer and Turing Award winner, had quit Google after more than a decade so he could warn about AI's dangers. He said digital intelligence might overtake humans far sooner than he had thought, and he later won the…
- AI finds abaucin, a narrow-spectrum antibiotic against the superbug Acinetobacter baumannii ★★★
McMaster and MIT researchers (Nature Chemical Biology, May 2023) trained a model on ~7,500 screened molecules and found abaucin, which selectively kills A. baumannii by disrupting lipoprotein trafficking (LolE) and controlled infection in a mouse wound model.
- Leading AI scientists sign the one-sentence statement on AI extinction risk ★★★★
Hundreds of AI researchers and executives, including Hinton, Bengio, Altman, Hassabis and Amodei, signed: 'Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.'
- NVIDIA becomes the first chipmaker worth $1 trillion ★★★
Driven by demand for AI accelerators after ChatGPT, NVIDIA's market capitalization briefly topped $1 trillion on 30 May 2023, the first chip company to do so; it later passed $3T (June 2024), $4T (July 2025) and $5T (October 2025).
- AlphaDev discovers faster small-sort routines, merged into LLVM's C++ standard library ★★★
AlphaDev (Nature, 7 Jun 2023) treated writing assembly as a game and found sort3/sort4/sort5 routines shorter than human versions; they were merged into LLVM libc++. Critics argued the gains were small tricks a compiler or GPT-4 could also find.
- RFdiffusion: diffusion models design new proteins that work in the lab ★★★★
David Baker's lab (Nature, July 2023) fine-tuned RoseTTAFold as a diffusion model to generate new protein backbones for binders, symmetric assemblies and metal-binding sites. Hundreds of designs were experimentally characterised. A cryo-EM structure of a designed binder bound to influenza…
- Anthropic releases Claude 2 with public claude.ai access ★★★
Claude 2 improved coding, math and reasoning, offered a 100K-token context window, and launched with the public claude.ai beta in the US and UK.
- Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license ★★★★
Llama 2 (7B, 13B, 70B) and its chat-tuned variants were released free for research and most commercial use, in partnership with Microsoft, making strong open-weight LLMs available to businesses.
- AlphaMissense classifies 89% of all 71 million possible human missense mutations ★★★
AlphaMissense (Science, Sept 2023) scored all ~71 million possible single amino-acid substitutions in 19,233 human proteins and classified 89%: 57% likely benign and 32% likely pathogenic. Human experts had classified only 0.1%.
- US Executive Order 14110 on safe, secure and trustworthy AI ★★★★
President Biden signed a sweeping executive order on AI requiring developers of the most powerful models to share safety test results with the government and directing agencies on AI standards; it was revoked by President Trump on 20 January 2025.
- Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit and the Bletchley Declaration ★★★★
The UK hosted the first global AI Safety Summit on 1–2 November 2023; 28 countries plus the EU, including the US and China, signed the Bletchley Declaration on frontier AI risks.
- GraphCast: ML weather model beats the world's best physics-based 10-day forecast on 90% of targets ★★★★
GraphCast (Science, Nov 2023), a graph neural network trained on ECMWF reanalysis data, produced 10-day global forecasts in under a minute on one TPU. It beat ECMWF's HRES, the leading deterministic physics model, on 90.3% of 1,380 verification targets. It later became the basis of NOAA's…
- OpenAI's board fires and then reinstates Sam Altman ★★★
OpenAI's non-profit board abruptly removed CEO Sam Altman on 17 November 2023, saying he was 'not consistently candid'; after nearly all staff threatened to leave for Microsoft, he was reinstated days later with a new board.
- GNoME predicts 2.2 million new crystals, 380,000 stable, but novelty and usefulness are disputed ★★★★
DeepMind's GNoME (Nature, Nov 2023) used graph neural networks and active learning with DFT to predict 2.2 million new inorganic crystal structures, 380,000 of them computed to be stable. DeepMind called it '800 years' worth of knowledge'. Solid-state chemists later found 'scant evidence' of…
- Berkeley's A-Lab claims 41 new materials from autonomous synthesis; after critiques Nature corrects it to 36 'inorganic' (not 'novel') materials ★★★
Published alongside GNoME, the A-Lab paper (Nature, Nov 2023) claimed a robotic lab made 41 'novel' compounds from 58 targets in 17 days. Robert Palgrave and Leslie Schoop argued that many were known compounds or ordered versions of known disordered phases, and that the diffraction analysis was…
- Google DeepMind launches Gemini 1.0 ★★★★
Google introduced Gemini 1.0 in Ultra, Pro and Nano sizes, a natively multimodal model family; Gemini Ultra was reported as the first model to exceed human-expert performance on MMLU (90.0%).
- Mistral AI releases Mixtral 8x7B, an open mixture-of-experts model ★★★
Paris-based Mistral AI released Mixtral 8x7B under Apache 2.0, a sparse mixture-of-experts model that matched or beat Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 on many benchmarks while using ~13B active parameters per token.
- FunSearch: an LLM finds new cap-set constructions, the first LLM discovery in open maths ★★★★
FunSearch (Nature, Dec 2023) paired a code LLM with an automated evaluator in an evolutionary loop. It found a cap set of size 512 in dimension 8 (previous best 496) and better lower bounds on the asymptotic cap-set capacity. It also found bin-packing heuristics beating first-fit and best-fit.
- Explainable deep learning discovers a new structural class of antibiotics against MRSA ★★★
Felix Wong, James Collins and colleagues (Nature, Dec 2023) screened ~39,000 compounds, trained graph neural networks, and used explainable substructure analysis on ~12M compounds. They found a new structural class of antibiotics active against MRSA and VRE that worked in mouse models.
- Coscientist: a GPT-4 agent plans and runs real chemistry experiments from plain-English prompts ★★★
Gabe Gomes's group (Nature, Dec 2023) built Coscientist, a GPT-4-based agent that searches documentation, writes code and drives lab automation. Across six tasks it included successfully planning and optimising palladium-catalysed cross-coupling reactions (Suzuki and Sonogashira) from a single…