Releases

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.