Timeline of AI and language models

Next in 2025

Showing major highlights of language and multimodal models only (less focus on text-to-image generation models). Showing Western models mostly (less focus on China, South Korea). Showing selected major milestones in AI development. The timeline is now ordered chronologically.

See a more comprehensive view of all model highlights—including counts for parameters and tokens—in the Models Table.

1947

Turing lecture

First public lecture (London, 1947) to mention computer intelligence. Turing said: ‘What we want is a machine that can learn from experience… the possibility of letting the machine alter its own instructions provides the mechanism for this.’ A few months later, he introduced many of the central concepts of AI in an unpublished paper: Intelligent Machinery. Britannica

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1950

Turing test (paper)

Read the paper

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1956

‘Artificial intelligence’ coined by Minsky et al

Read the article by Dartmouth, USA

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1966

ELIZA (chatbot)

MIT

Read the Wiki article

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2011

February

Watson (system)

IBM

Appeared on Jeopardy! against champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, winning the first place prize of $1m. 

Read my comparison with GPT-3.

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2017

August

Transformer (architecture)

Google

Read the Google blog

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2018

January

ULMFit 34M (model)

fast.ai

Read the paper

June

GPT-1 117M (model)

OpenAI

Read the paper

October

BERT 340M (model)

Google

Read the paper

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2019

February

GPT-2 1.5B (model)

OpenAI

Read the paper

October

BERT used for search

Google

Read the Google blog

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2020

January

Meena 2.6B (chatbot model)

Google

Read the Google blog

April

BlenderBot 1.0 (chatbot model)

Facebook

Read the Facebook blog

May

GPT-3 175B (model)

OpenAI

Read the paper
Alan’s analysis

September

GPT-3 writes a newspaper column

The Guardian/OpenAI

Read the article

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2021

January

The Pile v1 (dataset)

EleutherAI

Read the EleutherAI blog

March

Wudao 1.0 (model)

BAAI

Read the paper

June

GPT-J-6B (model)

EleutherAI

See the GitHub repo

June

LaMDA 137B (chatbot model)

Google

Read the Google blog
Alan’s analysis

June

Wudao 2.0 (model)

BAAI

Read the paper

June

M6 1T – MultiModality-to-MultiModality Multitask Mega-transformer (sparse model)

Alibaba Dharma Academy

Read the release (Chinese)

August

Jurassic-1 178B (model)

AI21

Read the paper

October

Megatron-Turing NLG 530B (model)

NVIDIA + Microsoft

Read more about Megatron
Alan’s analysis

November

M6 10T – MultiModality-to-MultiModality Multitask Mega-transformer (sparse model)

Alibaba Dharma Academy

Read the release (Chinese)

November

BERT 480B & 200B (model)

Google

Read the release, 2

December

52B (model)

Anthropic

Read the paper

December

GLaM 1.1T (model)

Google inc

Read the Google blog

December

Gopher 280B (model)

Google AI

Read the paper

December

ERNIE 3.0 Titan 260B (model)

Baidu

Read the paper

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2022

March

Chinchilla 70B (model)

DeepMind

Read the paper
Alan’s analysis

March

BLOOM – tr11-176B-ml (model)

BigScience

See the repo

April

PaLM 540B (model)

Google Inc

Read the Google blog
Alan’s analysis

April

Flamingo (Chinchilla 70B + 10B visual model)

DeepMind

Read the blog + paper

May

OPT-175B (model)

Meta AI

Read the paper

May

LaMDA 2 137B (chatbot model)

Google AI

Watch the launch video

May

Gato (Cat) 1.18B (general model)

DeepMind

Read the paper

November

GPT-3.5 – text-davinci-003 (model)

OpenAI

Alan’s analysis

November

ChatGPT (model)

OpenAI

Read the blog
Alan’s analysis

December

RT-1 35M (general model)

Google

Read the paper

December

RL-CAI 52B (model)

Anthropic

Read the paper

December

OPT-IML 175B (model)

Meta AI

Read the paper

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2023

February

LLaMA-65B (model)

Meta AI

Read the paper

March

Alpaca 7B (model)

Stanford

Read the release

March

GPT-4 1.76T (model)

OpenAI

Read the paper, 
Alan’s analysis

May

PaLM 2 340B (model)

Google

Read the paper

June

phi-1 1.3B (model)

Microsoft

Read the paper

June

Inflection-1 (model)

Inflection AI

Read the paper

July

Claude 2 (model)

Anthropic

Read the announce

July

Llama 2 70B (model)

Meta AI

Read the paper

September

Falcon 180B (model)

TII

Read the announce

October

ERNIE 4.0 (model)

Baidu

Read the announce.
Alan’s analysis

November

Grok-1 314B (model)

xAI

Read the announce (archive)
Alan’s analysis

December

Gemini (model)

Google DeepMind

Read the technical report.
Alan’s analysis

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2024

February

Sora (world model)

OpenAI

Read the technical report

February

Gemini 1.5 (model)

Google DeepMind

Read the paper (PDF)
Alan’s analysis

March

Claude 3 Opus (model)

Anthropic

Read the paper (PDF)

April

Llama 3 70B (model)

Meta AI

Read the announce

April

phi-3 14B (model)

Microsoft

Read the paper

June

Nemotron-4-340B (model)

NVIDIA

Read the paper

June

Claude 3.5 Sonnet (model)

Anthropic

Read the announce

July

Llama 3.1 405B (model)

Meta AI

Read the announce

August

Grok-2 (model)

xAI

Read the announce
Alan’s analysis

September

o1 (model)

OpenAI

Read the announce
Alan’s analysis

October

Claude with computer use (model)

Anthropic

Read the announce

December

Nova (model)

Amazon

Read the paper
Alan’s analysis

December

Llama 3.3 70B (model)

Meta AI

Read the model card

December

Gemini 2.0 (model)

Google DeepMind

Read the technical notes 

December

o3

OpenAI

Alan’s analysis

December

DeepSeek-V3 685B (A37B MoE)

DeepSeek-AI

Read the paper

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2025

January

R1

DeepSeek-AI

Read the paper

February

Grok-3

xAI

Alan’s analysis

February

Claude 3.7 Sonnet

Anthropic

Read the announce

February

Phi-4 multimodal 5.6B & mini 3.8B

Microsoft

Read the paper

February

GPT-4.5

OpenAI

Read the paper

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Next…

TBA

GPT-5

OpenAI

Alan’s analysis

TBA

Claude 4

Anthropic

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Models Table

Summary of current models: View the full data (Google sheets)

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Alan D. Thompson is a world expert in artificial intelligence, advising everyone from Apple to the US Government on integrated AI. Throughout Mensa International’s history, both Isaac Asimov and Alan held leadership roles, each exploring the frontier between human and artificial minds. His landmark analysis of post-2020 AI—from his widely-cited Models Table to his regular intelligence briefing The Memo—has shaped how governments and Fortune 500s approach artificial intelligence. With popular tools like the Declaration on AI Consciousness, and the ASI checklist, Alan continues to illuminate humanity’s AI evolution. Technical highlights.

This page last updated: 13/Feb/2025. https://lifearchitect.ai/timeline/↑