Releases

OpenAI released Baselines, open-source high-quality implementations of reinforcement-learning algorithms.

At Google I/O, the company frames its strategic transition from mobile-first to AI-first products and computing.

Google announces its second-generation TPU and plans to offer Cloud TPUs to Google Cloud customers.

NVIDIA introduced its GPU Cloud catalog, later branded NGC, for optimized deep-learning containers and software.

NVIDIA introduced the Volta architecture and V100 GPU, including Tensor Cores built for deep learning.

Baidu announced its open autonomous-driving platform.

Facebook released the Caffe2 deep-learning framework for scalable cross-platform training and deployment.

Facebook AI Research released FAISS for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors.

Hugging Face raised approximately $1.2 million in early angel funding to develop its conversational AI startup.

Baidu introduced its voice-assistant experience powered by DuerOS.

Baidu introduced its conversational AI operating system for devices and services.

IBM commercialized enterprise conversational-AI tooling that evolved into watsonx Assistant.

IBM launched an AI-powered enterprise search and document-understanding service.

Scale began building distributed contributor platforms and training operations to support large-scale annotation, expert-data, and evaluation programs.

Scale launched Remotasks to train and coordinate distributed contributors performing data annotation and review tasks.

Databricks raised a $60 million Series C led by New Enterprise Associates.

Amazon unveiled a checkout-free store using computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning.

OpenAI released Universe, a software platform for training intelligent agents across games, websites, and applications.

AWS introduced a managed text-to-speech service with natural-sounding voices.

AWS introduced the conversational AI service built from the speech recognition and language understanding technology behind Alexa.

AWS introduced managed image analysis for object, scene and face detection.

AWS selected MXNet as its preferred deep-learning framework and committed engineering investment to the open-source project.

Microsoft creates the AI and Research Group, combining research, information-platform and AI product teams under Harry Shum.

Oracle introduced the infrastructure platform that became OCI, later forming the base for its managed AI services and GPU cloud.

DeepMind introduces WaveNet, a neural generative model for raw audio waveforms that substantially improves speech synthesis.