Releases

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.

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.