Releases

Microsoft organizes Project Turing to develop large language models shared across Bing, Office, Dynamics and Azure.

Google researchers publish the T5 approach and Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, framing diverse NLP tasks in one text-to-text format.

Databricks raised $400 million in Series F financing at a $6.2 billion valuation.

NVIDIA expanded EGX with certified servers, software and ecosystem support for AI, IoT and 5G at the edge.

Databricks introduced the MLflow Model Registry for centralized model versioning and lifecycle management.

Facebook AI released Detectron2, a modular object-detection and segmentation library.

Hugging Face released DistilBERT, a smaller and faster distilled BERT model retaining most of the teacher model’s language-understanding performance.

Hugging Face renamed pytorch-transformers to Transformers and expanded the library’s framework and architecture support.

Facebook agreed to acquire CTRL-labs, bringing neural-interface research into Reality Labs.

OpenAI released the 774-million-parameter GPT-2 model and shared further analysis of misuse and detection.

Scale raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Founders Fund at a valuation above $1 billion.

Baidu released an open OCR toolkit built on PaddlePaddle.

Baidu published a continual pre-training framework for incremental multi-task learning.

Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI and becomes its exclusive cloud partner for new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and the companies formed an exclusive cloud-computing partnership.

The completed Red Hat acquisition established the hybrid-cloud and open-source platform underpinning IBM's later AI portfolio.

IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat to anchor an open hybrid-cloud platform for enterprise software and AI.

Facebook AI introduced wav2vec, a self-supervised approach to speech representation learning from raw audio.

Facebook AI released AI Habitat, a simulation platform for embodied AI research.

Google releases MediaPipe as a cross-platform framework for building perception and multimodal ML pipelines.

NVIDIA introduced EGX to bring real-time AI computing to edge and industrial environments.

Microsoft open-sources InterpretML for training interpretable models and explaining black-box predictions.

OpenAI introduced MuseNet, a deep neural network for generating multi-instrument musical compositions.

OpenAI Five defeated the reigning Dota 2 world champion team OG in a live best-of-three match.

FAIR researchers published a transformer language model that learned biological properties from protein sequences.

Facebook open-sourced its Deep Learning Recommendation Model reference implementation.

AWS released optimized Docker images for deep-learning training and inference.

Baidu released its first knowledge-enhanced language representation model.

Baidu introduced knowledge-enhanced pre-training through ERNIE.

OpenAI created a capped-profit entity, OpenAI LP, to scale investment in compute and talent while keeping the nonprofit mission in control.

MLflow 1.0 marked the first stable major release of the open-source ML lifecycle platform.

OpenAI introduced GPT-2 and began a staged release process due to misuse concerns.

Databricks raised $250 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $2.75 billion.

Pipeline Builder became available for visual data-transformation authoring in Foundry.

Apollo's continuous-delivery capabilities became the deployment layer for Palantir software.

Workshop became available for building operational applications on the Ontology.

Palantir launched Apollo to continuously deliver and manage software across heterogeneous environments.

Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang founded Cohere to build broadly usable natural-language AI, later focusing on enterprise deployment.

Scale introduced a managed workspace for configuring annotation projects, instructions, quality controls, and review workflows.

Gradio launched as an open-source Python framework for rapidly building browser interfaces around machine-learning models.

Microsoft open-sources ONNX Runtime as a cross-platform high-performance inference engine.

DeepMind's first AlphaFold system achieves top performance in the CASP13 protein-structure prediction assessment.

Google Research releases JAX for composable automatic differentiation and accelerator-backed numerical computing.

AWS launched attachable fractional GPU acceleration for EC2 and SageMaker inference workloads.

AWS announced its first custom machine-learning inference chip.

AWS launched a reinforcement-learning education platform built around an autonomous scale race car.

AWS introduced document AI for extracting text, handwriting, forms and tables.

AWS introduced a managed forecasting service based on technology used in Amazon's retail operations.

AWS introduced a managed service for building individualized recommendations using technology derived from Amazon.com.

AWS introduced a managed data-labeling service combining human annotation with active learning.

AWS launched a HIPAA-eligible NLP service for extracting medical entities and relationships from text.

Google open-sources BERT, enabling bidirectional pre-training for language understanding and downstream NLP tasks.

Oracle launched a multi-skill enterprise digital assistant using natural-language understanding and machine learning.

Hugging Face released an open-source PyTorch implementation and pretrained checkpoints for BERT, the project that evolved into the Transformers library.

NVIDIA launched RAPIDS as an open-source GPU-accelerated data science and machine-learning suite.

NVIDIA launched the T4 GPU and TensorRT 5 as a data-center inference platform.

Scale expanded its annotation platform around the image, video, lidar, and sensor-fusion requirements of autonomous-vehicle developers.

Scale raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with participation from Accel, Y Combinator, and other investors.

Baidu announced its first Kunlun AI accelerator for cloud and edge workloads.

Baidu introduced its in-house Kunlun AI computing architecture.

Baidu launched a full-featured machine-learning platform for algorithm developers.

Apollo 3.0 added production support for autonomous minibuses, delivery vehicles and valet parking.

Baidu launched a PaddlePaddle development and education platform for model building.

Baidu Brain 3.0 added multimodal semantic understanding and more than 110 AI capabilities.

OpenAI presented its five-agent Dota 2 system trained through large-scale self-play.

IBM Research demonstrated an AI system that generated evidence-backed arguments and debated a human expert.

OpenAI published the original GPT approach: generative pre-training followed by discriminative fine-tuning.

Databricks introduced MLflow as an open-source platform for managing the machine-learning lifecycle.

Microsoft agrees to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock, bringing the developer platform that later launched GitHub Copilot into Microsoft.

NVIDIA introduced the Jetson AGX Xavier embedded AI computer for autonomous machines.

Hugging Face raised a $4 million seed round backed by investors including A.Capital, Betaworks, SV Angel, and Thirty Five Ventures.

Microsoft acquires conversational-AI startup Semantic Machines to advance more natural, context-aware dialogue systems.

Microsoft releases the first public preview of ML.NET, bringing cross-platform machine learning to .NET developers.

Microsoft researchers introduce Fairlearn to assess and mitigate unfairness in machine-learning systems.

Apollo 2.5 added high-speed-road support, lower costs, developer improvements and ApolloScape datasets.

Oracle released the first Autonomous Database cloud service, powered by machine-learning automation.

NVIDIA introduced Clara as a medical imaging and healthcare AI computing platform.

NVIDIA introduced DGX-2 with 16 V100 GPUs connected by NVSwitch for large-scale AI training.

Apollo 2.0 added cloud services, reference hardware and vehicle platforms for simple urban roads.

Runway launched a web platform for accessible machine-learning-powered creative tools.

Runway was founded as an applied AI research company for creative media.

Shield AI deployed its Hivemind-powered autonomy in combat operations.

Quiver became available for time-series and engineering analysis in Foundry.

Contour became available as Foundry's point-and-click analytical application.

NVIDIA launched TITAN V, bringing Volta Tensor Core AI acceleration to desktop systems.

DeepMind publishes AlphaZero, a general self-play reinforcement-learning system for multiple board games.

AWS introduced managed natural-language processing for entity, sentiment, language and topic extraction.

AWS introduced a managed neural machine-translation service.

AWS introduced a managed automatic speech-recognition service.

AWS introduced a programmable deep-learning-enabled video camera for edge computer-vision development.

AWS launched an end-to-end managed platform for building, training and deploying machine-learning models.

Baidu upgraded DuerOS with expanded conversational AI capabilities.

Microsoft and Databricks announced Azure Databricks, a first-party Apache Spark analytics service on Azure.

Baidu launched a no-code interface for training and deploying custom AI models.

Oracle unveiled a self-driving database cloud using machine learning for tuning, patching, security and operations.

Microsoft and Facebook introduce the Open Neural Network Exchange format to improve model interoperability across AI frameworks.

The founders turned an experimental cryptocurrency-mining GPU setup into a business and expanded through opportunistic purchases of GPU hardware.

Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo, and Brannin McBee formed The Atlantic Crypto Corporation LLC, the company that later became CoreWeave.

Databricks raised $140 million in a Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Microsoft introduces Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based architecture for real-time deep-learning inference in cloud and edge systems.