Releases

Microsoft creates the AI and Research Group, combining research, information-platform and AI product teams under Harry Shum.

Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo founded Scale in San Francisco and entered Y Combinator to build an API for routing human work, which evolved into AI data infrastructure.

Microsoft takes the Tay social chatbot offline after coordinated abuse caused it to produce offensive content, prompting a public review of safeguards and social-AI deployment.

Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face in New York, initially building a conversational AI companion before pivoting toward open machine learning.

OpenAI launched as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Baidu reported a milestone in fully autonomous road testing under complex conditions.

Google completes its reorganization under Alphabet Inc.; Google becomes the principal operating subsidiary while Alphabet becomes the publicly traded parent.

Baidu opened its Silicon Valley AI Lab to expand foundational AI research.

Facebook formed its dedicated AI research laboratory, later known as FAIR, under Yann LeCun.

Baidu established its Institute of Deep Learning, later known as the Beijing Deep Learning Lab.

Databricks was founded by seven University of California, Berkeley researchers who helped create Apache Spark.

Google forms the Google Brain research initiative to pursue large-scale deep learning and neural networks.

Amazon launched AWS with Amazon S3, establishing the cloud platform that later became the foundation for its AI infrastructure and managed AI services.

Facebook, the company later renamed Meta, was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Palantir was founded to build software for integrating data and supporting consequential operational decisions.

Robin Li and Eric Xu founded Baidu in Beijing.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate Google, building a search company that would later become a major AI research, infrastructure and product provider.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in Bellevue, Washington; the company later expanded from ecommerce into cloud computing, devices and artificial intelligence.

Microsoft establishes Microsoft Research to pursue long-term computer-science research, including speech, vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates founded the company later renamed Oracle Corporation.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft, beginning the company that would later build a broad AI research, cloud and product portfolio.

The company that became IBM was incorporated as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.