Releases

Facebook acquired natural-language interface startup Wit.ai to strengthen conversational AI capabilities.

Shield AI was founded to protect service members and civilians through intelligent autonomous systems.

Amazon introduced the Alexa voice service with the first Echo smart speaker.

NVIDIA released the first version of its GPU-accelerated deep neural network primitives library.

Databricks raised $33 million to expand its cloud platform for large-scale data processing.

Microsoft launches Xiaoice, a social conversational AI designed for long-term, emotionally engaging interactions.

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

Microsoft introduces Cortana as a personal digital assistant for Windows Phone, later expanding it across Windows and Microsoft 365.

Google agrees to acquire London-based artificial-intelligence company DeepMind Technologies, bringing its research team into Google.

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

Andreessen Horowitz led Databricks' first institutional financing to commercialize Apache Spark.

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.

Facebook completed its initial public offering on Nasdaq under the ticker FB.

AlexNet, trained on NVIDIA GPUs, won the ImageNet competition and helped catalyze modern deep learning adoption.

IBM publicly demonstrated its DeepQA question-answering architecture through the Jeopardy! competition.

IBM Watson defeated champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the Jeopardy! exhibition, demonstrating large-scale open-domain question answering.

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

NVIDIA introduced CUDA and a C programming environment, opening its GPUs to general-purpose parallel computing.

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

Amazon launched a marketplace for human intelligence tasks that became widely used for labeling and evaluating machine-learning data.

Baidu's American depositary shares began trading on Nasdaq under BIDU.

Google completes its initial public offering on Nasdaq, establishing the public-company lineage now represented by Alphabet's GOOGL and GOOG shares.

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

Palantir's earliest government-focused platform evolved into Gotham, its operational intelligence system for defense and intelligence workflows.