Ghost Work (Gray and Suri)
A book documenting the hidden human workforce that labels data and moderates content behind so-called automated AI systems.
Google launches Project Euphonia for impaired speech
Google's Project Euphonia, announced in 2019, trains speech recognition to understand people with impairments from ALS, stroke, and Parkinson's.
Google Live Caption brings on-device captioning to any audio
Announced at Google I/O 2019, Live Caption captions any audio on an Android phone in real time, entirely on-device, for deaf and hard-of-hearing users.
San Francisco bans government facial recognition
In May 2019 San Francisco became the first major US city to ban its own agencies from using facial recognition technology.
The OECD AI Principles
In May 2019 the OECD adopted the first intergovernmental standard on AI - five values-based principles that 47 countries and entities now back.
Pluribus masters six-player poker
Pluribus, by Carnegie Mellon and Facebook AI, beat elite pros at six-player no-limit poker in 2019 - a first superhuman result in a multiplayer poker game.
OpenAI LP and the Microsoft partnership
In 2019 OpenAI restructured as a capped-profit company and Microsoft invested 1 billion dollars, creating the financial structure behind much of the AI boom.
Cerebras unveils the Wafer-Scale Engine, a chip the size of a wafer
In 2019 Cerebras revealed the Wafer-Scale Engine, a single AI chip with 1.2 trillion transistors and 400,000 cores - the largest chip ever built.
hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn and the legality of scraping public data
The Ninth Circuit ruled that scraping publicly available web data likely does not violate the US hacking law (CFAA), a key precedent for AI data collection.
The Transformers library
Hugging Face's open-source Transformers library put state-of-the-art language models one pip install away, becoming the distribution layer of the LLM era.
OpenAI solves a Rubik's Cube with a robot hand
OpenAI's Dactyl system solved a Rubik's Cube one-handed, trained entirely in simulation with automatic domain randomization.
DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge final
DARPA's SC2 used AI radios to share the radio spectrum autonomously; Team GatorWings of the University of Florida won the $2M top prize.
Google claims quantum supremacy with the Sycamore processor
Google's 54-qubit Sycamore chip ran a sampling task in 200 seconds it said would take a supercomputer 10,000 years - the first claimed quantum supremacy.
BERT Comes to Google Search
Google announced it was using BERT to better understand the intent behind everyday search queries.
AlphaStar reaches Grandmaster in StarCraft II
DeepMind's AlphaStar reached Grandmaster level in StarCraft II, ranking above 99.8 percent of human players across all three races.
Deezer open-sources Spleeter, fast music stem separation
Deezer released Spleeter, an open-source tool that splits a song into stems up to 100x faster than real time on a GPU.
AI Dungeon turns GPT-2 into an infinite text adventure
Nick Walton's AI Dungeon turns OpenAI's GPT-2 into an infinite text adventure where players type any action.
Wildlife Insights launches AI camera-trap analysis
In 2019 Google and conservation groups launched Wildlife Insights, an AI platform that classifies camera-trap photos 3,000x faster than people.
Google AI mammography study outperforms radiologists (Nature 2020)
A 2020 Nature study by Google Health reported an AI breast-cancer screening system reducing false positives and false negatives versus radiologists.
U.S. Census Bureau Adopts Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census
The U.S. Census Bureau made differential privacy the official confidentiality protection for 2020 Census data, the largest such government deployment.
BlueDot's air-travel model forecasts COVID-19's early international spread
Days into the outbreak, BlueDot used global airline data to forecast the Wuhan virus would spread to Bangkok, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Taipei.
Scaling laws give AI a predictable recipe for bigger models
OpenAI researchers showed language model performance follows smooth power laws in model size, data, and compute.
London's Met Police deploys live facial recognition
In 2020 London's Metropolitan Police began operational live facial recognition, scanning passers-by against a watchlist in public spaces.
Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube
A 2020 study of 330,925 YouTube videos found users migrating from milder to more extreme political channels over time.
The DoD adopts five AI ethics principles
In February 2020 the US Defense Department adopted five AI ethics principles: responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable, and governable.
The 5th-generation Waymo Driver (2020)
Waymo unveiled its 5th-gen self-driving system in 2020 with custom lidar, imaging radar, and cameras built to scale at lower cost.
NVIDIA DLSS upscales games with a neural network
NVIDIA's DLSS uses a neural network on Tensor Cores to upscale lower-resolution game frames, boosting frame rates.
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
Toby Ord's 2020 book on existential risk, estimating a 1-in-6 chance of catastrophe this century and naming unaligned AI the largest single threat.
Suphx masters four-player mahjong
Microsoft Research's Suphx was the first AI to outrank most top human mahjong players, sitting above 99.99% of ranked players on Tenhou.
OpenAI's Jukebox generates raw-audio music with singing
OpenAI released Jukebox, a neural network that generates music as raw audio, including rough singing, conditioned on genre, artist, and lyrics.
NVIDIA A100: The Ampere Data-Center GPU
NVIDIA's Ampere A100 added TF32, multi-instance GPU partitioning, and became the dominant chip for training large models.
Microsoft builds a dedicated supercomputer for OpenAI on Azure
At Build 2020 Microsoft revealed an Azure supercomputer built exclusively for OpenAI with 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs, ranked in the world's top five.
GPT-3 makes few-shot learning work at massive scale
OpenAI's 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 performed many tasks from a few text examples alone, with no fine-tuning or weight updates.
Amazon pauses police use of Rekognition face recognition
In June 2020 Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of its Rekognition facial recognition technology.
The Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) launches
On 15 June 2020, 15 founding members launched GPAI, a multilateral initiative for responsible AI now run as a partnership with the OECD.
TikTok explains the For You recommendation system
In 2020 TikTok publicly described its For You feed, the recommender that made an interest-based feed the default.
MLB Statcast adopts Hawk-Eye pose tracking
In 2020 MLB rebuilt Statcast on Hawk-Eye cameras that track 30 skeletal points per player 30 times a second.
NSF launches the National AI Research Institutes
In 2020 the US National Science Foundation began funding multi-university National AI Research Institutes, a program that has since grown to dozens of centers.
Phi-sat-1 flies the first AI chip for Earth observation
In 2020 ESA's Phi-sat-1 carried the first AI chip into orbit, screening out cloudy images before sending data to Earth.
NumPy documented in Nature
NumPy, the library underpinning the Python data and AI stack, was formally documented in the 2020 Nature paper Array Programming with NumPy.
Duolingo introduces Birdbrain, its difficulty-tuning model
Duolingo's Birdbrain model, rolled out in 2020, predicts how likely a learner is to get each exercise right and tunes difficulty to match.
Waymo opens fully driverless rides to the public in Phoenix
On October 8, 2020 Waymo opened fully driverless rides with no safety driver to the public in Phoenix, the first such robotaxi service.
Landing AI Launches LandingLens for Factory Visual Inspection
Andrew Ng's Landing AI launched LandingLens, an end-to-end platform letting manufacturers train and deploy visual defect inspection without deep AI expertise.
The AI Incident Database launches
Launched in November 2020 by the Partnership on AI, the AI Incident Database catalogs real-world AI harms, modeled on aviation and cybersecurity reporting.
AlphaFold 2 cracks a 50-year protein-folding grand challenge
At the CASP14 contest, DeepMind's AlphaFold predicted protein 3D structures with accuracy rivaling slow, costly lab experiments.
C3.ai goes public on the NYSE under the ticker AI
Enterprise AI software maker C3.ai priced its IPO at $42 a share and listed on the NYSE under the symbol AI in December 2020.
Symptom-checker apps benchmarked against doctors on clinical vignettes
A 2020 BMJ Open study tested eight symptom-checker apps against GPs on 200 vignettes; Ada led the apps but no app matched doctors on diagnosis.
MuZero masters games without being told the rules
MuZero (2020) matched AlphaZero at Go, chess, and shogi and mastered Atari games, but unlike its predecessors was never given the rules and learned each world.