Releases

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.

Amazon opened Alexa to developers through the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service.

IBM created Watson Health to apply data and cognitive-computing technologies across healthcare and life sciences.

AWS launched its first managed machine-learning service for building predictive models from data in S3, Redshift and RDS.

Microsoft makes Azure Machine Learning generally available as a cloud platform for creating and deploying predictive models.

Amazon agreed to acquire chip-design company Annapurna Labs, strengthening its ability to build custom silicon for AWS.

Facebook acquired natural-language interface startup Wit.ai to strengthen conversational AI capabilities.

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.