1943–1989 · Foundations
A logician and a neurophysiologist show networks of simplified neurons can compute logic — the founding abstraction.
'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' reframes 'can machines think?' as a testable question.
McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon and colleagues coin 'artificial intelligence' and set its agenda.
The first trainable neural network hardware; the Navy predicts thinking machines. The hype-and-winter cycle begins.
A proof of single-layer limits helps freeze neural-network funding for a decade — the first AI winter's seed.
Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams show multi-layer networks can learn internal representations.
Morris Chang invents the pure-play foundry — manufacture for everyone, compete with no one.
Convolutional networks deployed on US mail — deep learning's first industrial success.
1990–2011 · The long ramp
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem start a graphics-chip company at a Denny's.
Brute-force search takes chess; the win is narrow but the symbolism is not.
Fei-Fei Li's 14-million-image dataset bets that data is the bottleneck.
2012–2016 · Deep learning works
Two consumer GPUs halve the error rate. Deep learning's era — and NVIDIA's second act — begins.
Goodfellow's adversarial networks and Google's sequence-to-sequence models open generation and translation.
A 15-month crash ASIC project puts custom inference silicon in production — revealed to the world in 2016.
Altman, Musk, Sutskever, Brockman and others launch a nonprofit lab with $1B pledged.
Deep RL takes Go a decade early; move 37 enters folklore. 280M people watch.
2017–2019 · Transformers
NVIDIA builds matrix math into silicon — the first AI-specific GPU feature.
Eight Googlers publish the transformer. Everything on this site descends from it.
OpenAI and Google show pre-training + fine-tuning beats task-specific models.
OpenAI stages the release citing misuse — the first mainstream fight about publishing model weights.
2020–2022 · Scaling
175B parameters; in-context learning; Kaplan's curves say more compute keeps paying.
Ampere becomes the workhorse of the first scaling wave.
The first mass-market LLM product — code completion from Codex.
Protein structure solved to experimental accuracy; 200M structures follow.
Hopper's Transformer Engine and FP8 are built for the models to come.
DeepMind: most models are undertrained on data. Every training plan changes.
Image generation on consumer GPUs; the fine-tune ecosystem and the copyright wars begin.
October 7 rules cut China off from A100/H100-class chips and advanced fab tools — compute becomes statecraft.
2023–present · The build-out
Capability jumps again; technical details go dark; Microsoft commits ~$10B more.
The first chipmaker to a $1T market value, on data-center guidance that stuns Wall Street.
A800/H800 workarounds banned; performance-density rules close the loopholes.
OpenAI's board crisis ends with Altman back and the board remade — governance meets capability in public.
Two-die B200 and the GB200 NVL72 make the rack the unit of computing — and liquid cooling mandatory.
Test-time compute becomes the new scaling axis.
Memphis build resets industry assumptions about how fast a frontier cluster can rise.
Constellation and Microsoft sign a 20-year, 835 MW PPA — AI money starts reversing nuclear retirements.
Hinton (Physics) and Hassabis/Jumper (Chemistry) — the academy ratifies the era.
1.742 exaFLOPS on AMD MI300A — the public sector's biggest disclosed machine.
AWS commits its own silicon to Anthropic at hundred-thousand-chip scale.
OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX unveil an up-to-$500B US buildout; Abilene is site one.
An open reasoning model at disclosed bargain cost; NVIDIA falls ~17% in a day (~$589B) — then the Jevons argument wins the year.
The GPU cloud lists at ~$23B — the market's first pure-play AI infrastructure stock.
Google's inference flagship: 9,216-chip pods for the 'age of inference'.
AMD's CDNA4 reaches Blackwell class; OpenAI appears on stage.
$14.3B for 49% of Scale and a hiring spree with nine-figure packages.
First company to the mark — ahead of every national stock market but a handful.
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.
Circular or catalytic? The vendor-financing debate defines the autumn.
First shut US reactor ever returned to service — the nuclear revival's proof point.
MI450 anchors OpenAI's second silicon supplier; equity warrants align them.
Google Cloud deal worth tens of billions; a gigawatt of TPU capacity slated for 2026.
GTC DC: 'half a trillion in bookings' visibility through 2026.
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.
Structured records on this site reflect public information as of mid-January 2026; the News section stays live. See Methodology.