Timeline of AI and language models

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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 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 A few months later, he introduced many of the central concepts of AI in an unpublished paper: Intelligent Machinery.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)

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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

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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

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2018

January

ULMFit 34M (model)

fast.ai

June

GPT-1 117M (model)

OpenAI

October

BERT 340M (model)

Google

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2019

February

GPT-2 1.5B (model)

OpenAI

October

BERT used for search

Google

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2020

January

Meena 2.6B (chatbot model)

Google

April

BlenderBot 1.0 (chatbot model)

Facebook

May

GPT-3 175B (model)

OpenAI

September

GPT-3 writes a newspaper column

The Guardian/OpenAI

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2021

January

The Pile v1 (dataset)

EleutherAI

March

Wudao 1.0 (model)

BAAI

June

GPT-J-6B (model)

EleutherAI

June

LaMDA 137B (chatbot model)

Google

June

Wudao 2.0 (model)

BAAI

June

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

Alibaba Dharma Academy

August

Jurassic-1 178B (model)

AI21

October

Megatron-Turing NLG 530B (model)

NVIDIA + Microsoft

November

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

Alibaba Dharma Academy

November

BERT 480B & 200B (model)

Google

December

52B (model)

Anthropic

December

GLaM 1.1T (model)

Google inc

December

Gopher 280B (model)

Google AI

December

ERNIE 3.0 Titan 260B (model)

Baidu

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2022

March

Chinchilla 70B (model)

DeepMind

March

BLOOM – tr11-176B-ml (model)

BigScience

April

PaLM 540B (model)

Google Inc

April

Flamingo (Chinchilla 70B + 10B visual model)

DeepMind

May

OPT-175B (model)

Meta AI

May

LaMDA 2 137B (chatbot model)

Google AI

May

Gato (Cat) 1.18B (general model)

DeepMind

November

GPT-3.5 – text-davinci-003 (model)

OpenAI

November

ChatGPT (model)

OpenAI

December

RT-1 35M (general model)

Google

December

RL-CAI 52B (model)

Anthropic

December

OPT-IML 175B (model)

Meta AI

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2023

February

LLaMA-65B (model)

Meta AI

March

Alpaca 7B (model)

Stanford

March

GPT-4 1.76T (model)

OpenAI

May

PaLM 2 340B (model)

Google

June

phi-1 1.3B (model)

Microsoft

June

Inflection-1 (model)

Inflection AI

July

Claude 2 (model)

Anthropic

July

Llama 2 70B (model)

Meta AI

September

Falcon 180B (model)

TII

October

ERNIE 4.0 (model)

Baidu

November

Grok-1 314B (model)

xAI

December

Gemini (model)

Google DeepMind

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2024

February

Sora (world model)

OpenAI

February

Gemini 1.5 (model)

Google DeepMind

March

Claude 3 Opus (model)

Anthropic

April

Llama 3 70B (model)

Meta AI

April

phi-3 14B (model)

Microsoft

June

Nemotron-4-340B (model)

NVIDIA

June

Claude 3.5 Sonnet (model)

Anthropic

July

Llama 3.1 405B (model)

Meta AI

August

Grok-2 (model)

xAI

September

o1 (model)

OpenAI

October

Claude with computer use (model)

Anthropic

December

Nova (model)

Amazon

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Next…

TBA

Grok-3

xAI

TBA

GPT-5

OpenAI

TBA

Claude 4

Anthropic

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Models Table

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

Show older timeline slides

Download source (PDF)


Time between releases of OpenAI’s GPT models

Model Months since last release
GPT-4
Mar/2023
14m
14 months
GPT-3 2022 text-davinci-002
Jan/2022
20m
20 months
GPT-3
May/2020
15m
15 months
GPT-2
Feb/2019
8m
8 months
GPT-1
Jun/2018
Baseline

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Dr Alan D. Thompson is an AI expert and consultant, advising Fortune 500s and governments on post-2020 large language models. His work on artificial intelligence has been featured at NYU, with Microsoft AI and Google AI teams, at the University of Oxford’s 2021 debate on AI Ethics, and in the Leta AI (GPT-3) experiments viewed more than 5 million times. A contributor to the fields of human intelligence and peak performance, he has held positions as chairman for Mensa International, consultant to GE and Warner Bros, and memberships with the IEEE and IET. Technical highlights.

This page last updated: 14/Aug/2024. https://lifearchitect.ai/timeline/