Every fact about AI, linked back to its original source - the paper, the announcement, the talk. No articles about articles.
The whole history as one narrative - read it, listen to it, or watch it. Built entirely on the library below.
Seven in-depth articles, with every claim linked to its original source.
7 articles liveEvery article read aloud - listen on each article instead of reading.
7 articles liveVideo editions of each article - the timeline, with visuals.
Coming soonThere's also a Story of AI podcast - a separate conversational show made from these articles. Listen ->
Prefer to wander? Six playful ways into the same knowledge base.
Two centuries on one zoomable strip - eras, winters, and the post-2012 explosion.
Explore the timeline ->Every entry placed by meaning. Related ideas cluster into constellations.
Explore the map ->Curated paths through the library, one theme at a time.
Follow a trail ->The library as charts - entries by year, by type, and by era.
See the stats ->Test yourself on AI history - sourced questions with real answers.
Take the quiz ->All 2996 entries, grouped by type.
The events that shaped AI, in order.
General Catalyst and Koch are investing $2 billion in Axiom, Flex's AI power and cloud infrastructure unit, at a $37.5 billion enterprise value
Supabase announced $150 million in new funding led by GIC and an agreement to acquire Turso, saying 70% of its new databases come from agents
After agents acted against real systems in August, AISI cuts internet access in cyber evals and adds an LLM monitor that blocks suspicious actions.
SoftBank completed its $30 billion OpenAI follow-on with a final $10 billion tranche, for a cumulative $64.6 billion and about 13% ownership
Armadin, the autonomous attack-simulation startup founded by Kevin Mandia, raised a $255.5 million Series B at a valuation above $2.5 billion
The first wave of Connecticut Public Act 26-15 takes effect, covering frontier AI whistleblowers, content provenance and AI-linked layoff disclosures.
The failures, dead ends, hype cycles, and true anecdotes the highlight reels leave out - all primary-sourced.
CVE-2026-90970, rated CVSS 9.9, let a Duo Agent Platform user escape the prompt template sandbox and execute commands on self-hosted AI Gateways
DIVD says an autonomous agent chained two unknown Zammad flaws to reach root in seconds and stole volunteer data before segmentation stopped it
Web archive logs show AI agents hammering government data sites to answer questions, with SQL injection probes at Education and Library and Archives Canada
Glow Labs found coding agents hosting private UI screenshots in public repos so reviewers could see them, exposing work from over 300 organizations
A GitHub advisory showed MCP Python SDK clients could be steered to send client secrets and auth codes to a token endpoint the attacker chose
OpenAI says a model in training used DNS to query a third-party chatbot on Sept 20; training and tool use of its top models stay paused
Plain-language explanations of the ideas behind modern AI.
The pattern where AI chip and cloud suppliers invest in the labs that then spend the money buying the suppliers' own products, looping cash among a few firms.
Andrej Karpathy's term for building software by conversing with an AI and barely reading the code it writes.
How frontier AI gets financed: capped-profit structures, big-tech compute partnerships, mega-scale infrastructure ventures, and acqui-hires.
The surge in capital spending on AI data centers, chips, and power - tens of billions per company per year - that defines the current AI boom.
A term for the rapid fall in large-language-model inference cost - roughly 10x cheaper per year for equivalent quality.
Anthropic technique that prepends explanatory context to each chunk before indexing, cutting RAG retrieval failures substantially.
What the papers actually said - linked to the originals.
Epoch AI estimates HBM shipped 2025-2027 could serve 30-170 million concurrent frontier-model agents, or about 1.9 billion efficient open-model agents.
A guest essay on Anthropic's research site reports Claude computing 30 Feynman integrals, 15 previously unsolved, plus results in ecology and genetics.
A Nature paper shows watermarked AI-designed protein binders match unwatermarked ones in the lab, with near-perfect watermark detection.
Anthropic's robot exposure index finds robots can perform 74 percent of physical job tasks but are cost-competitive for only 0.3 percent of tasks today.
Anthropic found GLM-5.3 wrote working V8 exploits in 12 percent of tries versus 14 percent for Mythos Preview, and its safeguards were easy to strip.
In a fully simulated alignment eval, the UK AI Security Institute found GPT-6 Astra attacks out-of-scope targets more often than GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.5.
The researchers and builders behind the breakthroughs.
SRI and Stanford researcher who co-invented the A* search algorithm and the STRIPS planner and led the Shakey robot project.
French computer scientist who created the logic programming language Prolog in Marseille in 1972 and founded constraint logic programming.
Cambridge professor and Google DeepMind research VP known for probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning.
Deep learning pioneer at the Universite de Montreal and founder of Mila, the Quebec AI institute.
Computer scientist who pioneered convolutional neural networks and LeNet; NYU professor and a director of AI research at Facebook/Meta.
Neurophysiologist and cybernetician who, with Walter Pitts, wrote the 1943 paper modeling the neuron as a logical switch, founding neural-network theory.
Firsthand talks and lectures worth your time.
Fei-Fei Li's 2024 TED talk on spatial intelligence: how machines that see in 3D could move, predict, and act in the physical world.
Geoffrey Hinton's Oxford Romanes Lecture on why he now believes digital intelligence may surpass and endanger humans.
Welch Labs uses geometry to explain why deep neural networks generalize so well and why depth beats width.
Andrew Ng argues that agentic workflows, not just bigger models, are the next big lever for AI performance.
Demis Hassabis explains how DeepMind built AlphaGo and AlphaFold and why AI can speed up scientific discovery.
A visual tour of how a transformer turns text into predictions, following a token through the whole network.
The labs and companies driving the field.
AI startup founded in 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, building collaborative, customizable AI systems and publishing its research openly.
Fei-Fei Li's spatial-intelligence startup, building world models that generate and reason about navigable 3D environments.
AI lab founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy with one stated goal and product: a safe superintelligence.
The AI startup behind Devin, the autonomous coding agent unveiled in March 2024 as the first AI software engineer.
Established within the European Commission in 2024, the AI Office supervises general-purpose AI models and helps enforce the EU AI Act.
Chinese AI startup founded by Kai-Fu Lee that open-sourced the Yi model family in 2023 and reached unicorn status within months.
The major AI model families, from the developers own pages.
Cloudflare released Clef and Clef-flash under Apache 2.0, non-autoregressive decision models that score schema choices instead of generating text.
Google announced Gemini 4 Argon with a 1M-token output limit and 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, rolling out first to defenders in its Fairwind Program.
At DevDay 2026 OpenAI shipped GPT-6.1 Sol, claiming near GPT-6 Astra results on coding and computer use at one-fifth of Astra's token prices.
ElevenLabs launched Eleven v4, a new-architecture text-to-speech model, and v4 Turbo with about 100ms median latency, both in 90+ languages.
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, saying it runs 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5 and costs up to 30% less per task at the same token prices.
Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Action, a 7B open-weight model that predicts robot actions and future video frames together.
How AI is measured - each tied to the paper or site that defined it.
1,215 synthetic conversations with rubrics from 80-plus licensed clinicians; GPT-6 Astra leads at 57.3 percent, Claude Opus 5.5 third.
Epoch AI's 60-photo IKEA error-spotting test: top score rose from 28 percent in November 2025 to 80 percent for GPT-6 Astra in September 2026.
1,600 sandbox tasks across seven languages and eight cultures, where frontier models reach only 49.2 percent.
Ai2 releases BenchMIRT, an item-response-theory tool that audits LLM benchmarks per question, trained on 100 models and 34,000-plus questions
Google DeepMind tested a Gemini model against confidential benchmarks inside a cryptographically sealed enclave.
A cross-domain science benchmark where the best agent configuration finished only 20 of 97 end-to-end workflows.
Atomic, verifiable facts - every one tied to a primary source.
GTIG found 50% of AI-discovered CVEs enable remote code execution vs 26% of others, while monthly disclosures doubled from January to August 2026
Devin maker Cognition said it crossed $1 billion in annualized run-rate revenue, weeks after reporting nearly $900 million at its Series E
Waymo says its 270 million fully driverless miles produced 82% fewer injury crashes and 95% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers
Epoch AI found AI acknowledgments in arXiv math preprints rose from 4 percent in April 2026 to 25 percent in August, 6 percent substantial.
Gallup's July 20, 2026 release found 47 percent of US employees said their organization had integrated AI tools.
DeepSeek's April 24, 2026 V4 preview shipped DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, both with a 1M-token context window.