Releases

Baidu launched its core AI technology engine and open-capability platform.

Baidu opened PaddlePaddle to the global developer community for deep learning, vision, speech and NLP.

Facebook AI Research released PyTorch, a Python-first tensor and dynamic neural-network framework.

Facebook AI Research released fastText, a library for efficient text classification and word representations.

Scale launched the data infrastructure that became its core Data Engine, combining APIs, machine assistance, and human review to create high-quality training data.

Scale launched an API that let developers submit human-powered data tasks with one line of code, establishing the foundation of its AI data business.

Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo founded Scale in San Francisco and entered Y Combinator to build an API for routing human work, which evolved into AI data infrastructure.

Google publicly reveals the TPU, a custom accelerator designed to speed machine-learning workloads in its data centers.

Amazon open-sourced its Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine for recommendation workloads.

Facebook introduced FBLearner Flow, its internal platform for managing the full lifecycle of machine-learning models.

OpenAI released the public beta of Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement-learning algorithms.

The Pascal-based Tesla P100 accelerator debuted alongside DGX-1 for deep learning and HPC.

NVIDIA unveiled DGX-1, its first integrated deep-learning supercomputer.

Microsoft launches Cognitive Services APIs for adding vision, speech, language, knowledge and search capabilities to applications.

Microsoft takes the Tay social chatbot offline after coordinated abuse caused it to produce offensive content, prompting a public review of safeguards and social-AI deployment.

AlphaGo wins its landmark five-game match against 18-time world champion Lee Sedol by four games to one.

Microsoft releases its Computational Network Toolkit under an open-source license for deep neural-network training.

Co-founder Ali Ghodsi became chief executive officer of Databricks.

Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf founded Hugging Face in New York, initially building a conversational AI companion before pivoting toward open machine learning.

OpenAI launched as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Baidu reported a milestone in fully autonomous road testing under complex conditions.

Google releases TensorFlow as an open-source machine-learning framework, making internal deep-learning infrastructure broadly available.

AlphaGo becomes the first computer program to defeat a professional Go player without handicaps on a full-sized board.

Google completes its reorganization under Alphabet Inc.; Google becomes the principal operating subsidiary while Alphabet becomes the publicly traded parent.

Baidu began building enterprise cloud services that evolved into Baidu AI Cloud.