Releases

Baidu launched its core AI technology engine and open-capability platform.

Baidu opened PaddlePaddle to the global developer community for deep learning, vision, speech and NLP.

Facebook AI Research released PyTorch, a Python-first tensor and dynamic neural-network framework.

Facebook AI Research released fastText, a library for efficient text classification and word representations.

Scale launched the data infrastructure that became its core Data Engine, combining APIs, machine assistance, and human review to create high-quality training data.

Scale launched an API that let developers submit human-powered data tasks with one line of code, establishing the foundation of its AI data business.

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.

Google publicly reveals the TPU, a custom accelerator designed to speed machine-learning workloads in its data centers.

Amazon open-sourced its Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine for recommendation workloads.

Facebook introduced FBLearner Flow, its internal platform for managing the full lifecycle of machine-learning models.

OpenAI released the public beta of Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement-learning algorithms.

The Pascal-based Tesla P100 accelerator debuted alongside DGX-1 for deep learning and HPC.

NVIDIA unveiled DGX-1, its first integrated deep-learning supercomputer.

Microsoft launches Cognitive Services APIs for adding vision, speech, language, knowledge and search capabilities to applications.

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.

AlphaGo wins its landmark five-game match against 18-time world champion Lee Sedol by four games to one.

Microsoft releases its Computational Network Toolkit under an open-source license for deep neural-network training.

Co-founder Ali Ghodsi became chief executive officer of Databricks.

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 releases TensorFlow as an open-source machine-learning framework, making internal deep-learning infrastructure broadly available.

AlphaGo becomes the first computer program to defeat a professional Go player without handicaps on a full-sized board.

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

Baidu began building enterprise cloud services that evolved into Baidu AI Cloud.

Amazon opened Alexa to developers through the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service.

IBM created Watson Health to apply data and cognitive-computing technologies across healthcare and life sciences.

AWS launched its first managed machine-learning service for building predictive models from data in S3, Redshift and RDS.

Microsoft makes Azure Machine Learning generally available as a cloud platform for creating and deploying predictive models.

Amazon agreed to acquire chip-design company Annapurna Labs, strengthening its ability to build custom silicon for AWS.

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

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.

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.

Amazon completed its initial public offering on Nasdaq under the ticker AMZN.

IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match.

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.

Microsoft completes its initial public offering on Nasdaq, establishing the public-company lineage represented by MSFT.

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.

IBM researchers began foundational work in machine learning, game-playing systems and artificial intelligence during the field's formative era.

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