Releases

Databricks raised $1 billion led by Franklin Templeton at a $28 billion post-money valuation.

OpenAI introduced CLIP, a neural network trained on image-text pairs for transferable visual recognition.

OpenAI introduced DALL-E, a model that generates images from text descriptions.

Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna founded Modal to build a developer-friendly serverless cloud for compute-intensive workloads.

Anthropic was founded at the beginning of 2021 as an AI safety and research company led by Dario and Daniela Amodei.

DeepMind publishes MuZero, which plans using a learned model without being told the environment's underlying rules.

NVIDIA opened the Omniverse collaboration and simulation platform to beta users.

AWS introduced a HIPAA-eligible health data lake using FHIR and machine learning.

AWS introduced tools for bias detection and model explainability.

Scale acquired real-time video-understanding startup Helia AI and brought its team and infrastructure expertise into the Nucleus platform.

Scale raised $155 million in a Series D led by Tiger Global at a post-money valuation above $3.5 billion.

AWS introduced machine-learning-based anomaly detection for business and operational metrics.

AWS introduced an end-to-end condition-monitoring system using sensors and machine learning.

AWS introduced predictive maintenance from industrial sensor data.

AWS introduced a computer-vision service for visual defect and anomaly detection.

AWS introduced an ML-powered service for detecting abnormal operational behavior and recommending remediation.

AWS introduced pretrained models and solution templates to accelerate machine-learning deployment.

AWS announced its first custom chip purpose-built for high-performance machine-learning training.

AlphaFold 2 demonstrates accuracy competitive with experimental structures at CASP14, marking a major protein-folding breakthrough.

Transformers v4 began its release cycle with broad framework and architecture support and a standardized model API.

NVIDIA introduced a deskside AI system with four A100 GPUs for workgroups.

NVIDIA doubled A100 accelerator memory to 80GB using HBM2e.

Facebook AI released M2M-100, a multilingual machine-translation model translating directly between 100 languages.

Baidu opened Apollo Go autonomous ride-hailing to public users in Beijing.

NVIDIA introduced Maxine, a cloud-native suite of GPU-accelerated AI video-conferencing and streaming software.

Scale released the core Nucleus workspace for dataset visualization, search, curation, collaboration, and model-error analysis.

Scale launched Nucleus as a dataset-management and model-debugging workspace for visualizing, curating, searching, and collaborating on machine-learning data.

Scale introduced a self-serve, pay-as-you-go product for receiving production-quality labels and instruction feedback in as little as one hour.

Microsoft spins Xiaoice into an independent company while retaining an investment interest.

Scale launched a mapping product for computer-vision and autonomous path-planning workflows.

Hugging Face began its hosted inference platform with a serverless API for models on the Hub, later expanding into dedicated endpoints and provider routing.

Hugging Face introduced a hosted API for running models from the Hub without managing serving infrastructure.

Databricks acquired open-source visualization company Redash to expand SQL analytics and collaboration.

Facebook AI introduced wav2vec 2.0 for self-supervised speech learning with limited labeled data.

OpenAI launched a general-purpose API for accessing its language models.

Microsoft Research introduces DeBERTa, improving Transformer language models with disentangled attention and enhanced mask decoding.

OpenAI published GPT-3, demonstrating few-shot learning at 175 billion parameters.

Hugging Face launched hosted dataset repositories alongside its Datasets library, creating a shared catalog for reusable machine-learning data.

Hugging Face released a unified open-source library and catalog for loading, processing, streaming, and sharing datasets.

NVIDIA began shipping DGX A100, an integrated 5-petaflop AI system with eight A100 GPUs.

NVIDIA launched the A100 Tensor Core GPU, its first Ampere data-center accelerator for training and inference.

Hugging Face made model repositories a central Hub product for versioning, documenting, discovering, and reusing pretrained models.

Hugging Face expanded from an NLP library into a Git-based collaboration platform for sharing models and machine-learning artifacts.

OpenAI released Jukebox, a neural network that generated music including rudimentary singing as raw audio.

AWS and Facebook jointly released TorchServe, an open-source model-serving library for PyTorch.

Hugging Face introduced its high-performance Rust-backed Tokenizers library for production-scale text preprocessing.

Microsoft open-sources DeepSpeed with the ZeRO optimizer to reduce the compute and memory cost of large-model training.

Oracle launched a managed collaborative environment for building, training and deploying machine-learning models.

Microsoft introduces Turing-NLG, a 17-billion-parameter generative language model and, at the time, the largest published language model.

Databricks articulated the lakehouse architecture, combining data-lake openness with data-warehouse management and performance.

Baidu released its open NLP development library for PaddlePaddle.

CoreWeave established a managed, multi-tenant Kubernetes cloud running directly on bare metal for GPU-accelerated machine-learning and inference workloads.

Scale began supporting U.S. defense and national-security AI programs, extending its data infrastructure into government missions.

Hugging Face raised $15 million in a Series A led by Lux Capital to expand its open-source natural-language-processing platform.

AWS launched automated model building with full visibility into generated models and notebooks.

AWS launched a web-based integrated development environment for machine learning.

AWS introduced managed human-review workflows for machine-learning predictions.

AWS introduced an intelligent enterprise-search service using machine learning and natural-language queries.

AWS introduced ML-powered code review and performance recommendations.

AWS made Inferentia-powered EC2 instances generally available for machine-learning inference.

AWS introduced a generative-AI learning service and musical keyboard.

CoreWeave launched its specialized cloud business around on-demand NVIDIA GPU infrastructure for compute-intensive workloads.

After the cryptocurrency downturn, the company redirected its GPU fleet toward accelerated cloud workloads and changed its name to CoreWeave, Inc.

OpenAI completed the staged GPT-2 release with the 1.5-billion-parameter model and accompanying research.

Microsoft organizes Project Turing to develop large language models shared across Bing, Office, Dynamics and Azure.

Google researchers publish the T5 approach and Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, framing diverse NLP tasks in one text-to-text format.

Databricks raised $400 million in Series F financing at a $6.2 billion valuation.

NVIDIA expanded EGX with certified servers, software and ecosystem support for AI, IoT and 5G at the edge.

Databricks introduced the MLflow Model Registry for centralized model versioning and lifecycle management.

Facebook AI released Detectron2, a modular object-detection and segmentation library.

Hugging Face released DistilBERT, a smaller and faster distilled BERT model retaining most of the teacher model’s language-understanding performance.

Hugging Face renamed pytorch-transformers to Transformers and expanded the library’s framework and architecture support.

Facebook agreed to acquire CTRL-labs, bringing neural-interface research into Reality Labs.

OpenAI released the 774-million-parameter GPT-2 model and shared further analysis of misuse and detection.

Scale raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Founders Fund at a valuation above $1 billion.

Baidu released an open OCR toolkit built on PaddlePaddle.

Baidu published a continual pre-training framework for incremental multi-task learning.

Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI and becomes its exclusive cloud partner for new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and the companies formed an exclusive cloud-computing partnership.

The completed Red Hat acquisition established the hybrid-cloud and open-source platform underpinning IBM's later AI portfolio.

IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat to anchor an open hybrid-cloud platform for enterprise software and AI.

Facebook AI introduced wav2vec, a self-supervised approach to speech representation learning from raw audio.

Facebook AI released AI Habitat, a simulation platform for embodied AI research.

Google releases MediaPipe as a cross-platform framework for building perception and multimodal ML pipelines.

NVIDIA introduced EGX to bring real-time AI computing to edge and industrial environments.

Microsoft open-sources InterpretML for training interpretable models and explaining black-box predictions.

OpenAI introduced MuseNet, a deep neural network for generating multi-instrument musical compositions.

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.