Releases

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.

Facebook formed its dedicated AI research laboratory, later known as FAIR, under Yann LeCun.

Andreessen Horowitz led Databricks' first institutional financing to commercialize Apache Spark.

Baidu established its Institute of Deep Learning, later known as the Beijing Deep Learning Lab.

Databricks was founded by seven University of California, Berkeley researchers who helped create Apache Spark.

Facebook completed its initial public offering on Nasdaq under the ticker FB.

AlexNet, trained on NVIDIA GPUs, won the ImageNet competition and helped catalyze modern deep learning adoption.

IBM publicly demonstrated its DeepQA question-answering architecture through the Jeopardy! competition.

IBM Watson defeated champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the Jeopardy! exhibition, demonstrating large-scale open-domain question answering.

Google forms the Google Brain research initiative to pursue large-scale deep learning and neural networks.

NVIDIA introduced CUDA and a C programming environment, opening its GPUs to general-purpose parallel computing.

Amazon launched AWS with Amazon S3, establishing the cloud platform that later became the foundation for its AI infrastructure and managed AI services.

Amazon launched a marketplace for human intelligence tasks that became widely used for labeling and evaluating machine-learning data.