Timeline

OpenAI stages the release citing misuse — the first mainstream fight about publishing model weights.

175B parameters; in-context learning; Kaplan's curves say more compute keeps paying.

Image generation on consumer GPUs; the fine-tune ecosystem and the copyright wars begin.

Capability jumps again; technical details go dark; Microsoft commits ~$10B more.

Meta makes open weights a strategy, not a leak.

Test-time compute becomes the new scaling axis.

An open reasoning model at disclosed bargain cost; NVIDIA falls ~17% in a day (~$589B) — then the Jevons argument wins the year.

Frontier reasoning from Colossus; a trillion-parameter open MoE from Beijing.

A router unifies fast and thinking modes for ChatGPT's ~700M weekly users.

First open OpenAI language models since GPT-2 — the open-weights race is now three-way.

Trained on TPUs end to end — the strongest non-NVIDIA statement yet.

Three frontier releases in three weeks (Gemini 3, GPT-5.1, Opus 4.5) — cadence itself becomes the story.