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History of AI: a timeline from the 1940s to today

From the first model of an artificial neuron in 1943 to today’s AI models, companies, chips and laws: dated milestones in research and business. Each entry links to its source.

Last reviewed Oct 11, 2026

How to read this timeline. It is a selection of widely documented milestones in research, business, products, policy and hardware, not a complete history, and inclusion is not endorsement. Confirmed marks a paper, law, publisher, news organization or institutional page that states the fact. Reported marks a milestone whose source is the company involved, so the claim is its own. Dates are given to the precision the source gives. Sources are numbered at the bottom.

Era
Category

1940s–1950s Beginnings

  1. 1943
    Research & technical

    McCulloch and Pitts model the neuron

    Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity” in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, describing networks of simplified neurons that compute logical functions.1 Confirmed

  2. 1950
    Research & technical

    Turing proposes an “imitation game”

    Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in the journal Mind (59, no. 236, pp. 433–60), asking whether machines can think and proposing a test that later became known as the Turing test.2 Confirmed

  3. Aug 31, 1955
    Research & technical

    Dartmouth proposal

    McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon date their proposal for a summer 1956 research project at Dartmouth “on Artificial Intelligence.”3 Confirmed

  4. July 1958
    Research & technical

    The perceptron

    The U.S. Office of Naval Research unveils Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron, an early neural-network machine, running on an IBM 704 computer.4 Confirmed

1960s–1970s Early programs and the first slowdown

  1. Jan 1966
    Research & technical

    ELIZA

    Joseph Weizenbaum describes ELIZA in Communications of the ACM (vol. 9, no. 1), a program for natural-language conversation between a person and a computer.5 Confirmed

  2. 1969
    Research & technical

    “Perceptrons” book

    Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish Perceptrons, a mathematical analysis of what single-layer perceptrons can and cannot compute.6 Confirmed

  3. July 1972
    Policy

    The Lighthill Report

    Sir James Lighthill’s survey of artificial-intelligence research, written for the UK Science Research Council, is dated July 1972.7 Confirmed

  4. 1970s
    Research & technical

    A harder decade for basic AI research

    Nilsson’s history of the field says the Lighthill Report led to a substantial curtailment of AI research in the United Kingdom, and that it and the U.S. Mansfield Amendment caused difficulties for basic AI research during the 1970s, even as promised applications kept overall funding going.8 Confirmed

1980s–1990s Expert systems, the AI winter and learning machines

  1. Early 1980s
    Products

    Expert systems go to work

    At Carnegie Mellon, John McDermott helps develop R1, later XCON, a rule-based expert system that configured Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX computer orders.9 Confirmed

  2. Oct 9, 1986
    Research & technical

    Backpropagation paper

    Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams publish “Learning representations by back-propagating errors” in Nature.10 Confirmed

  3. Mid–late 1980s
    Corporate & business

    The second “AI winter”

    Nilsson writes that inflated expectations in the early 1980s, and systems that did not match them, led in the mid- to late 1980s to what came to be called an “AI winter.”11 Confirmed

  4. 1989
    Research & technical

    Neural networks read handwritten ZIP codes

    Yann LeCun and colleagues publish “Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition” in Neural Computation.12 Confirmed

  5. 1993
    Corporate & business

    Nvidia is founded

    Nvidia’s corporate timeline says it was founded on April 5, 1993, by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.13 Reported

  6. May 1997
    Research & technical

    Deep Blue beats Kasparov

    IBM says its Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match in May 1997.14 Reported

  7. 1997
    Research & technical

    Long short-term memory (LSTM)

    Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber publish “Long Short-Term Memory” in Neural Computation, a recurrent network design later widely used for speech and language.15 Confirmed

  8. 1999
    Hardware

    Nvidia introduces the GPU

    Nvidia’s corporate timeline says it invented the GPU, the graphics processing unit, in 1999.16 Reported

2000s–2010s Data, GPUs and deep learning

  1. 2006
    Research & technical

    Deep belief networks

    Geoffrey Hinton, Simon Osindero and Yee-Whye Teh publish “A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets,” an early step in the revival of deep neural networks.17 Confirmed

  2. 2006
    Hardware

    CUDA

    Nvidia’s timeline lists the 2006 introduction of CUDA, its platform for general-purpose computing on GPUs, later widely used to train neural networks.18 Reported

  3. 2009
    Research & technical

    ImageNet dataset

    Jia Deng, Fei-Fei Li and colleagues present ImageNet, a large labeled image database, at CVPR 2009.19 Confirmed

  4. Feb 2011
    Research & technical

    Watson wins Jeopardy!

    IBM says its Watson system won the television quiz show Jeopardy! in February 2011.20 Reported

  5. Oct 4, 2011
    Products

    Siri on the iPhone 4S

    Apple introduces the iPhone 4S with Siri, a voice assistant.21 Reported

  6. 2012
    Research & technical

    AlexNet at NIPS

    Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton present a deep convolutional neural network for ImageNet classification at NIPS 2012.22 Confirmed

  7. Jan 2014
    Corporate & business

    Google acquires DeepMind

    Google acquires DeepMind, a London AI research company founded in 2010, as reported by The Guardian.23 Confirmed

  8. June 2014
    Research & technical

    Generative adversarial networks

    Goodfellow and colleagues post “Generative Adversarial Networks” to arXiv.24 Confirmed

  9. Dec 11, 2015
    Corporate & business

    OpenAI is founded

    OpenAI announces itself as a non-profit AI research company.25 Reported

  10. Dec 2015
    Research & technical

    Residual networks (ResNet)

    Kaiming He and colleagues at Microsoft Research post “Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition,” which made much deeper networks trainable.26 Confirmed

  11. March 2016
    Research & technical

    AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol

    Google DeepMind says AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4–1 in a five-game match in Seoul in March 2016.27 Reported

  12. May 2016
    Hardware

    Google’s TPU

    Google announces the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom chip for machine learning that it says had been running in its data centers for more than a year.28 Reported

  13. June 2017
    Research & technical

    The transformer

    Vaswani and colleagues post “Attention Is All You Need,” introducing the transformer architecture, to arXiv.29 Confirmed

  14. 2018 award
    Research & technical

    Turing Award for deep learning

    The ACM names Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun recipients of its 2018 A.M. Turing Award.30 Confirmed

  15. Oct 2018
    Research & technical

    BERT

    Devlin and colleagues at Google post BERT, a pre-trained bidirectional transformer for language understanding, to arXiv.31 Confirmed

  16. May 2019
    Policy

    OECD AI Principles

    OECD member countries adopt the OECD Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence, the first intergovernmental standard on AI.32 Confirmed

  17. July 22, 2019
    Corporate & business

    Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI

    Microsoft and OpenAI announce a partnership in which Microsoft invests $1 billion and becomes OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider.33 Reported

2020s Foundation models, rules and infrastructure

  1. May 2020
    Research & technical

    GPT-3

    OpenAI researchers post “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners,” describing GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters.34 Confirmed

  2. May 2020
    Hardware

    Nvidia A100

    Nvidia announces its A100 data-center GPU, based on the Ampere architecture.35 Reported

  3. Nov 30, 2020
    Research & technical

    AlphaFold at CASP14

    Google DeepMind says its AlphaFold system solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, the protein-structure prediction problem assessed at CASP14.36 Reported

  4. Jan 2021
    Products

    DALL·E

    OpenAI introduces DALL·E, a model that creates images from text descriptions.37 Reported

  5. May 2021
    Corporate & business

    Anthropic launches

    Anthropic announces it has raised $124 million to build more reliable AI systems.38 Reported

  6. Nov 2021
    Policy

    UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI

    UNESCO’s member states adopt the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.39 Confirmed

  7. Mar 2022
    Hardware

    Nvidia H100 (Hopper)

    Nvidia announces the Hopper architecture and the H100 GPU for AI data centers.40 Reported

  8. Aug 2022
    Products

    Stable Diffusion released openly

    Stability AI announces the public release of Stable Diffusion, an open image-generation model.41 Reported

  9. Nov 30, 2022
    Products

    ChatGPT

    OpenAI introduces ChatGPT.42 Reported

  10. Jan 23, 2023
    Corporate & business

    Microsoft extends its OpenAI partnership

    Microsoft announces the third phase of its partnership with OpenAI, a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment.43 Reported

  11. Feb 2023
    Products

    Meta releases LLaMA

    Meta releases LLaMA, a family of large language models, to researchers.44 Reported

  12. Mar 14, 2023
    Products

    GPT-4

    OpenAI announces GPT-4.45 Reported

  13. Mar 2023
    Products

    Claude

    Anthropic introduces Claude, its AI assistant.46 Reported

  14. May 2023
    Corporate & business

    Nvidia reaches $1 trillion

    CNBC reports Nvidia’s market value hit $1 trillion at the market open on May 30, 2023, before giving back gains.47 Confirmed

  15. July 2023
    Corporate & business

    xAI is announced

    Elon Musk announces the debut of a new AI company, xAI, as reported by CNBC.48 Confirmed

  16. Sept 2023
    Corporate & business

    Amazon invests in Anthropic

    Amazon announces it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, with AWS as a primary cloud provider.49 Reported

  17. Oct 30, 2023
    Policy

    U.S. Executive Order 14110

    The President signs Executive Order 14110 on the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI. The AI Index 2026 lists a Jan 23, 2025 executive order that rescinded earlier AI directives.50,51 Confirmed

  18. Nov 1–2, 2023
    Policy

    AI Safety Summit, Bletchley Park

    The UK hosts the AI Safety Summit on Nov 1–2, 2023.52 Confirmed

  19. Dec 6, 2023
    Products

    Gemini

    Google introduces Gemini, a family of multimodal models.53 Reported

  20. June 2024
    Corporate & business

    Nvidia becomes the most valuable company

    CNBC reports Nvidia passed Microsoft in market value to become the most valuable public company.54 Confirmed

  21. Aug 1, 2024
    Policy

    EU AI Act enters into force

    The European Union’s AI Act enters into force; its obligations phase in over several years.55 Confirmed

  22. Sept 12, 2024
    Products

    OpenAI o1 reasoning models

    OpenAI introduces o1-preview, a model that spends more time reasoning before it answers.56 Reported

  23. Oct 2024
    Research & technical

    Nobel Prizes recognize AI-related work

    The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” The Chemistry prize goes to David Baker “for computational protein design” and, jointly, to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”57,58 Confirmed

  24. Oct 2024
    Corporate & business

    OpenAI raises $6.6 billion

    OpenAI announces $6.6 billion in new funding at a $157 billion post-money valuation.59 Reported

  25. Jan 2025
    Research & technical

    DeepSeek-R1

    DeepSeek-AI posts the DeepSeek-R1 paper on reasoning via reinforcement learning to arXiv.60 Confirmed

  26. Jan 21, 2025
    Corporate & business

    Stargate announced

    OpenAI announces the Stargate Project, which it says plans $500 billion of AI infrastructure investment over four years.61 Reported

  27. Jan 2025
    Policy

    U.S. Executive Order 14179

    Executive Order 14179, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” is signed in the administration’s first days and directs the creation of an AI Action Plan.62 Confirmed

  28. Feb 2, 2025
    Policy

    EU AI Act: first measures apply

    Prohibited AI practices and AI-literacy obligations begin to apply.55 Confirmed

  29. Mar 2025
    Corporate & business

    OpenAI raises $40 billion

    OpenAI announces $40 billion in new funding at a $300 billion post-money valuation.63 Reported

  30. July 2025
    Policy

    U.S. AI Action Plan

    The White House publishes America’s AI Action Plan with three pillars: innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy and security.62 Confirmed

  31. Aug 2, 2025
    Policy

    EU rules for general-purpose AI models

    Obligations for providers of general-purpose AI models begin to apply under the EU AI Act.55 Confirmed

  32. Sept 1, 2025
    Policy

    Japan’s AI Promotion Act fully in force

    Japan’s Act on Promotion of Research and Development and Utilization of AI-Related Technologies takes full effect.64 Confirmed

  33. Dec 11, 2025
    Policy

    U.S. Executive Order 14365

    Signed Dec 11, 2025, the order sets a policy of a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI.65 Confirmed

  34. Jan 22, 2026
    Policy

    South Korea’s AI Basic Act takes effect

    The Ministry of Science and ICT announces the AI Basic Act is in force, with a grace period before penalties.66 Confirmed

  35. June 4, 2026
    Policy

    Canada launches a national AI strategy

    Prime Minister Carney launches “AI for All.”67 Confirmed

  36. Aug 2, 2026
    Policy

    EU AI Act: transparency rules and enforcement

    Per the Commission’s timeline, Article 50 transparency obligations and enforcement begin on Aug 2, 2026; later dates follow in Dec 2026, Dec 2027 and Aug 2028.55 Confirmed

  37. Sep 22, 2026
    Products

    OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna: cheaper, smaller siblings of GPT-6 Astra

    From our news feed (Confirmed): OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna: cheaper, smaller siblings of GPT-6 Astra. Read the story.68 Reported

  38. Sep 22, 2026
    Products

    Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5, priced 20% lower per token than Opus 5

    From our news feed (Confirmed): Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5, priced 20% lower per token than Opus 5. Read the story.69 Reported

  39. Sep 30, 2026
    Products

    Google announces Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier model in limited rollout

    From our news feed (Confirmed): Google announces Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier model in limited rollout. Read the story.70 Reported

  40. Oct 1, 2026
    Corporate & business

    Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help finance TPU infrastructure leases

    From our news feed (Confirmed): Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help finance TPU infrastructure leases. Read the story.71 Confirmed

  41. Oct 1, 2026
    Policy

    Sens. Murphy and Hawley announce bipartisan AI Agent Accountability Act on agent hacking liability

    From our news feed (Confirmed): Sens. Murphy and Hawley announce bipartisan AI Agent Accountability Act on agent hacking liability. Read the story.72 Confirmed

  42. Oct 5, 2026
    Hardware

    India’s AM Intelligence orders about 20,000 more Nvidia Rubin GPUs for AI data centers in India and Malaysia

    From our news feed (Confirmed): India’s AM Intelligence orders about 20,000 more Nvidia Rubin GPUs for AI data centers in India and Malaysia. Read the story.73 Reported

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