Releases

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.