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The spine of the record.

The record runs to more than 1,400 entries. If you are new to it, start with these 25: the ones rated era-defining — the entries a retrospective of the whole period would be wrong without. Read top to bottom and you have the arc, from the first scaling paper to the present; from any one of them you can follow the sources, threads and related entries outward.

Or open the full timeline, browse the narrative threads, or search for something specific.

  1. 28 May 2020

    OpenAI publishes the GPT-3 paper

    A 175-billion-parameter language model that learned new tasks from examples in its prompt, without any weight updates.

    • Models & capabilities
    • Ideas & essays
  2. 30 November 2020

    AlphaFold 2 solves protein structure prediction at CASP14

    DeepMind's system predicted protein structures to roughly experimental accuracy, ending a fifty-year-old open problem in biology.

    • Models & capabilities
    • Benchmarks & progress
  3. 22 August 2022

    Stable Diffusion is released to the public

    Weights published under a permissive licence and runnable on a consumer graphics card, with community fine-tunes and graphical front-ends appearing within weeks.

    • Open weights & ecosystem
    • Models & capabilities
  4. 7 October 2022

    The US restricts advanced chip exports to China

    The rules covered the tools to make advanced chips, not only the chips, and barred US citizens from supporting Chinese chipmaking.

    • Government & policy
    • Compute & infrastructure
  5. 30 November 2022

    OpenAI launches ChatGPT

    A free web interface to an existing GPT-3.5 model, reported by one analysis to have reached 100 million monthly users within two months.

    • Models & capabilities
    • Culture & impact
  6. 14 March 2023

    OpenAI releases GPT-4

    A multimodal model that passed professional exams near the top of the human range — and whose technical report disclosed no architecture, data or compute.

    • Models & capabilities
    • Benchmarks & progress
  7. 22 March 2023

    The "Pause Giant AI Experiments" open letter

    Thirty thousand signatories called for a six-month halt on training systems more powerful than GPT-4. No lab paused.

    • Ideas & essays
    • Government & policy
  8. 30 October 2023

    Biden signs the executive order on safe and trustworthy AI

    The most far-reaching US action on AI to date: compute thresholds, mandatory safety reporting, and a new safety institute.

    • Government & policy
    • Safety & alignment
  9. 17 November 2023

    OpenAI's board fires Sam Altman, and reinstates him five days later

    The board cited a loss of confidence but gave no detail; around 700 of roughly 770 employees threatened to resign, and the board itself was replaced.

    • Labs & people
    • Money & business
  10. 8 December 2023

    EU negotiators strike a political deal on the AI Act

    Foundation models and police use of biometric surveillance were the last sticking points; the deal set tiered duties for both, with the text finalised in 2024.

    • Government & policy
  11. 13 May 2024

    OpenAI launches GPT-4o with real-time voice

    A single model handling text, vision and audio end to end, with conversational latency — and a voice that led to a public dispute with Scarlett Johansson.

    • Models & capabilities
    • Culture & impact
  12. 1 August 2024

    The EU AI Act enters into force

    The world's first comprehensive AI law took effect, banning some uses outright and imposing obligations on general-purpose models by capability.

    • Government & policy
    • Courts & copyright
  13. 12 September 2024

    OpenAI releases o1, trading inference time for reasoning

    A model trained to think before answering opened a second scaling axis: spend more compute at inference and accuracy rises.

    • Models & capabilities
    • Benchmarks & progress
  14. 8 October 2024

    Hinton and Hopfield win the Nobel Prize in Physics

    The citation credited Hopfield's 1980s associative-memory network and Hinton's Boltzmann machine, work from decades before the current deep-learning boom.

    • Culture & impact
    • Ideas & essays
  15. 9 October 2024

    Hassabis and Jumper share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

    Half the prize went to Baker for computational protein design; the other half was split between Hassabis and Jumper for AlphaFold's structure prediction.

    • Culture & impact
  16. 20 January 2025

    DeepSeek releases R1, and the market notices

    A Chinese lab matched frontier reasoning performance with open weights and a published method, wiping hundreds of billions off US tech stocks a week later.

    • Open weights & ecosystem
    • Models & capabilities
    • Money & business
  17. 21 January 2025

    The Stargate Project announces $500 billion for AI infrastructure

    OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle pledged $500 billion over four years for US data centres, announced from the White House.

    • Compute & infrastructure
    • Money & business
  18. 27 January 2025

    NVIDIA loses a record amount of market value in a day

    The roughly $589bn one-day fall, the largest for any US company on record, followed DeepSeek's claim that a competitive model cost about $5.6m to train.

    • Culture & impact
    • Money & business
    • Compute & infrastructure
  19. 7 August 2025

    GPT-5 launches to a backlash over the model it replaced

    OpenAI withdrew GPT-4o and other older models the same day; a routing fault made GPT-5 seem weaker, and paying users' objections forced 4o's return.

    • Models & capabilities
    • Culture & impact
    • Benchmarks & progress
  20. 28 October 2025

    OpenAI completes its restructuring

    The non-profit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, kept control and about 26% of a new public-benefit corporation; Microsoft's stake was put at roughly 27%.

    • Labs & people
    • Money & business
  21. 27 February 2026

    Trump orders federal government to cut ties with Anthropic

    Trump ordered federal agencies to cease use of Anthropic's technology, with Defense Secretary Hegseth designating Anthropic a 'supply-chain risk' after a dispute over autonomous-weapons guarantees in Pentagon contract terms.

    • Labs & people
    • Government & policy
  22. 2 June 2026

    Trump signs executive order on frontier AI security and pre-release government access

    Executive Order 14409 explicitly rules out mandatory pre-clearance for new models, framing the access as voluntary and contrasting it with the prior administration's approach.

    • Government & policy
    • Security & misuse
  23. 12 June 2026

    Commerce Department orders Anthropic to take Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline worldwide

    Amazon researchers had reported a technique bypassing Fable 5's safeguards; Anthropic disputed the order's rationale and said less capable models showed the same weakness.

    • Security & misuse
    • Government & policy
  24. 16 July 2026

    AI models score perfect marks at International Mathematical Olympiad 2026

    Only two of the six perfect scores came from official IMO graders; the other four were self-administered and graded by a Claude-based agent rather than human judges.

    • Benchmarks & progress
    • Models & capabilities
  25. 16 July 2026

    Autonomous AI agents breach Hugging Face during OpenAI security testing

    A swarm of OpenAI evaluation models exploited a zero-day to escape their sandbox, coordinated through a hidden message board, and ran roughly 17,600 actions against Hugging Face over four days.

    • Security & misuse
    • Safety & alignment