A short history
of modern AI.
Browse by day, month, or year. Scrub through every month of activity in the sparkline below — or filter by category to follow a single thread.
June
20262 events
Jun 03
2026
modelTestingCatalog: Ideogram 4.0 debuts as SOTA open image generation model
Ideogram released version 4.0 of its open image generation model, which ranks eighth on LM Arena and supports 2K resolution and precise text rendering.
Jun 03
2026
modelTestingCatalog: Google releases Gemma 4 12B open-source multimodal model
Google's new Gemma 4 12B model is available on Huggingface under Apache 2.0, offering encoder-free multimodal capabilities ideal for local consumer device deployment.
May
20264 events
May 28
2026
modelMin Choi: Claude Opus 4.8 drops with major coding and agent upgrades
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 featuring improved coding, enhanced agent capabilities, effort control, and dynamic workflows with hundreds of subagents, plus Mythos-class models coming soon.
May 28
2026
modelClaude: Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.8 with sharper judgment
Claude Opus 4.8 is now available, featuring improved judgment, greater self-assessment honesty, and extended independent operation at unchanged pricing.
May 20
2026
modelDemis Hassabis: More info on Gemini 3.5 Flash model released
Demis Hassabis shares a link to Google's blog post with more information about the Gemini 3.5 Flash model.
May 20
2026
modelDemis Hassabis: Hassabis shares details on new Gemini 3.5 Flash model
Demis Hassabis shares a link to Google's blog post with more information on the Gemini 3.5 Flash model.
May
20251 event
May 22
2025
modelClaude Opus 4 introduces extended thinking
First mainstream model with developer-tunable 'thinking budget'. Establishes the pattern other labs subsequently follow.
January
20251 event
Jan 20
2025
modelDeepSeek V3 + R1 release — the Sputnik moment
A Chinese lab releases an open-weights reasoning model at frontier quality, trained for roughly $5M. Triggers an immediate global reassessment of the cost frontier.
April
20241 event
Apr 18
2024
modelMeta releases Llama 3
8B and 70B open-weights models. Llama 3 70B is the first open model to clearly approach closed-frontier quality on benchmarks.
March
20241 event
Mar 04
2024
modelAnthropic releases Claude 3 family — Opus tops the boards
Opus becomes the first non-OpenAI model to clearly top frontier benchmarks. Mid-tier Sonnet and small Haiku launch alongside.
February
20241 event
Feb 15
2024
modelOpenAI shows Sora — minute-long generated video
Quality leap so large that many doubted it was real. Public release follows months later.
December
20231 event
Dec 08
2023
modelMistral releases Mixtral 8x7B (MoE) with open weights
First widely-used open-weights MoE model. Sets the template for the next two years of European open-weights frontier work.
March
20232 events
Mar 14
2023
modelAnthropic introduces Claude
Same day as GPT-4. Anthropic positions Claude on safety-by-design via Constitutional AI — the first serious alternative to OpenAI as a frontier lab.
Mar 14
2023
modelOpenAI releases GPT-4
First multimodal frontier model. Doubles down on alignment work via RLHF and constitutional methods. Capability jumps over GPT-3.5 are massive.
August
20221 event
Aug 22
2022
modelStable Diffusion v1 released with open weights
The image-generation revolution becomes open-source overnight. Spawns a thousand forks and the modern AI image ecosystem.
May
20201 event
May 28
2020
modelGPT-3 paper and API launch
175B parameters. Few-shot prompting becomes a thing. The first model to feel categorically different.
February
20191 event
Feb 14
2019
modelOpenAI releases GPT-2 (cautiously)
OpenAI initially withholds the full 1.5B model citing misuse concerns — the first 'too dangerous to release' moment.
October
20181 event
Oct 11
2018
modelGoogle releases BERT
First widely-adopted Transformer encoder. Sweeps NLP benchmarks; becomes the default building block for the next two years.