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.

Palantir was founded to build software for integrating data and supporting consequential operational decisions.

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.