Year by year
AI, year by year.
The threads follow a single argument across the whole period; these do the opposite. Each is a short read on one calendar year — what moved forward, and what pushed back — as a way in before the day-by-day record.
- 2020
The year scale became a plan
GPT-3 turned the scaling hypothesis into a working demonstration and AlphaFold 2 cracked a fifty-year biology problem — while the field's first fights, over openness and over who gets to criticise it, took shape.
- 2021
Foundations, and the tools to build on them
Image generation, code assistants and open-source models turned last year's ideas into working tools, and Stanford gave the whole category a name — as the EU drafted the first serious attempt to regulate it.
- 2022
The year the public arrived
Image generators went mainstream and ChatGPT reached a hundred million people, turning AI from a developer's tool into a household subject — while open releases and US chip controls opened fault lines that are still widening.
- 2023
The gold rush, and the first alarms
GPT-4 raised the ceiling and a wave of open models lowered the floor, while a leadership crisis at OpenAI and a rush of warnings about catastrophic risk showed how fragile the field's foundations were.
- 2024
Reasoning, recognition, and real-world harm
Models learned to think for longer, AI's scientific work won two Nobel Prizes, and the EU's rulebook came into force — as deepfakes reached elections, chatbot-harm lawsuits began, and California's safety bill was vetoed.
- 2025
Reasoning, agents, and staggering sums of money
A cheap Chinese model shook the markets, reasoning systems reached mathematical-olympiad gold, and spending on AI infrastructure passed into the hundreds of billions — while safety incidents, copyright rulings and job worries moved from theory to evidence.
- 2026
So far: capability climbs, and control becomes the story
In the year to August, models produced genuine mathematical results and scored full marks at the maths olympiad, while a run of security incidents and a clash between Washington and Anthropic turned the question of who controls these systems into the central one.