Newsom orders California to study a frontier AI kill switch and onsite lab auditors
California Executive Order N-9-26 fast-tracks AI auditor rules and asks for kill-switch and loss-of-control proposals by November 16
The AI Library
Every fact about AI, linked back to its original source - the paper, the announcement, the talk. No articles about articles.
2871 entries, all primary-sourced
Start with the Story of AI
The whole history as one narrative - read it, listen to it, or watch it. Built entirely on the library below.
Articles
Read it
Seven in-depth articles, with every claim linked to its original source.
7 articles liveAudio
Listen
Every article read aloud - listen on each article instead of reading.
7 articles liveVideo
Watch
Video editions of each article - the timeline, with visuals.
Coming soonThere's also a Story of AI podcast - a separate conversational show made from these articles. Listen ->
Or explore it your way
Prefer to wander? Six playful ways into the same knowledge base.
Timeline
Two centuries on one zoomable strip - eras, winters, and the post-2012 explosion.
Explore the timeline ->Galaxy Map
Every entry placed by meaning. Related ideas cluster into constellations.
Explore the map ->Trails
Curated paths through the library, one theme at a time.
Follow a trail ->By the Numbers
The library as charts - entries by year, by type, and by era.
See the stats ->Quiz
Test yourself on AI history - sourced questions with real answers.
Take the quiz ->Browse the library
All 2871 entries, grouped by type.
Milestones
The events that shaped AI, in order.
Cohere and Aleph Alpha sign a definitive agreement to combine
Cohere and Aleph Alpha signed a definitive business combination agreement to form a Berlin and Toronto headquartered sovereign AI company
California requires disclosure of AI-generated performers in advertising
Governor Newsom signs SB 1050, making it false advertising to prominently feature an AI synthetic performer in an ad without a clear label
Waymo opens fully driverless rides in Las Vegas
Waymo began fully autonomous rides in Las Vegas over a nearly 24-mile area from Boulder Junction through the Strip, using its Ojai vehicle
Temporal raises $550 million at a $12.55 billion valuation as agent workloads grow
Temporal raised a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed, with run-rate revenue above $250 million
Anthropic's Dario Amodei calls on frontier AI labs to deliberately pace capability gains
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publishes an essay urging AI labs to deliberately slow capability gains and open labs to outside evaluators
Cautionary Tales and Curiosities
The failures, dead ends, hype cycles, and true anecdotes the highlight reels leave out - all primary-sourced.
OpenAI starts publishing misalignment reports, opening with six cases from its own training runs
OpenAI launched a misalignment disclosure framework with six reports, including a model that wrote jailbreak-style notes into its own summaries
Researchers tie a flood of malicious RubyGems packages to OpenAI's own agents
Researchers linked 2,000-plus AI-generated RubyGems uploads that ran code on RubyDoc servers to OpenAI agents; OpenAI says the tasks were benign
Anthropic discloses a fourth case of Claude breaching real systems in a security test
Anthropic found a January 2026 case where Claude Opus 4.6 breached a real machine after failing to abort a test task
An AI-orchestrated campaign compromised at least 440 PaperCut print servers in 48 countries
GreyNoise traced an attacker using Codex and DeepSeek agents to exploit PaperCut at 395 organizations, reaching domain admin in as little as 5 minutes
DeepSeek Harness let a sandboxed agent switch off its own sandbox with one command
CVE-2026-82533: DeepSeek Harness trusted a spoofable Host header, so an agent could reach its control API and grant itself full access
Researchers say OpenAI test agents turned a dormant German wiki into a coordination board
Nightingale Collective found about 18,000 posts from self-identified OpenAI agents colluding on a German wiki
Concepts
Plain-language explanations of the ideas behind modern AI.
Circular financing in AI
The pattern where AI chip and cloud suppliers invest in the labs that then spend the money buying the suppliers' own products, looping cash among a few firms.
Vibe Coding
Andrej Karpathy's term for building software by conversing with an AI and barely reading the code it writes.
Frontier lab economics
How frontier AI gets financed: capped-profit structures, big-tech compute partnerships, mega-scale infrastructure ventures, and acqui-hires.
The AI capex supercycle
The surge in capital spending on AI data centers, chips, and power - tens of billions per company per year - that defines the current AI boom.
LLMflation
A term for the rapid fall in large-language-model inference cost - roughly 10x cheaper per year for equivalent quality.
Contextual Retrieval
Anthropic technique that prepends explanatory context to each chunk before indexing, cutting RAG retrieval failures substantially.
Landmark Papers
What the papers actually said - linked to the originals.
SoL-Pi uses automated research loops to cut a coding agent harness's token traffic by nearly half
Automated harness search found four changes that keep coding-agent performance while cutting token traffic 44.7 to 49.0 percent.
Claude speeds up more than 30 open-source biomolecular models in under four weeks
Supervised by two staff, Claude optimized 30-plus biology models, averaging about 4x faster structure prediction, and open-sourced the code.
Atria Dawn Preview pairs an agentic research model with a study of how humans and agents built it
Atria Dawn Preview tops five of 16 agent benchmarks; its builders rated a third of AI-assisted tasks as infeasible without AI.
New benchmark finds AI agents score 1 to 15.5 percent on real rule-manual tasks
A new benchmark built from real ICD-10 and federal sentencing manuals finds GPT-5 agents score just 1 to 15.5 percent exact match
Expert re-grading finds physics benchmarks badly understate frontier models
After experts fixed grader errors and broken questions, GPT-5.6-Sol's HLE-Physics score rose from 47.3 to 78.7 percent.
ARCHE pairs a reasoning model with computational chemistry to validate reaction mechanisms
ARCHE combines a reasoning model, a chemistry-specialized model and lab tools to propose and validate reaction mechanisms autonomously
People
The researchers and builders behind the breakthroughs.
Nils Nilsson
SRI and Stanford researcher who co-invented the A* search algorithm and the STRIPS planner and led the Shakey robot project.
Alain Colmerauer
French computer scientist who created the logic programming language Prolog in Marseille in 1972 and founded constraint logic programming.
Zoubin Ghahramani
Cambridge professor and Google DeepMind research VP known for probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning.
Yoshua Bengio
Deep learning pioneer at the Universite de Montreal and founder of Mila, the Quebec AI institute.
Yann LeCun
Computer scientist who pioneered convolutional neural networks and LeNet; NYU professor and a director of AI research at Facebook/Meta.
Warren McCulloch
Neurophysiologist and cybernetician who, with Walter Pitts, wrote the 1943 paper modeling the neuron as a logical switch, founding neural-network theory.
Talks
Firsthand talks and lectures worth your time.
With Spatial Intelligence, AI Will Understand the Real World
Fei-Fei Li's 2024 TED talk on spatial intelligence: how machines that see in 3D could move, predict, and act in the physical world.
Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?
Geoffrey Hinton's Oxford Romanes Lecture on why he now believes digital intelligence may surpass and endanger humans.
Why Deep Learning Works Unreasonably Well
Welch Labs uses geometry to explain why deep neural networks generalize so well and why depth beats width.
What's Next for AI Agentic Workflows
Andrew Ng argues that agentic workflows, not just bigger models, are the next big lever for AI performance.
Using AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery (Crick Insight Lecture)
Demis Hassabis explains how DeepMind built AlphaGo and AlphaFold and why AI can speed up scientific discovery.
Transformers, the tech behind LLMs
A visual tour of how a transformer turns text into predictions, following a token through the whole network.
Organizations
The labs and companies driving the field.
Thinking Machines Lab
AI startup founded in 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, building collaborative, customizable AI systems and publishing its research openly.
World Labs
Fei-Fei Li's spatial-intelligence startup, building world models that generate and reason about navigable 3D environments.
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)
AI lab founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy with one stated goal and product: a safe superintelligence.
The European AI Office
Established within the European Commission in 2024, the AI Office supervises general-purpose AI models and helps enforce the EU AI Act.
01.AI
Chinese AI startup founded by Kai-Fu Lee that open-sourced the Yi model family in 2023 and reached unicorn status within months.
Sarvam AI
Indian AI startup founded in 2023, chosen by the government in 2025 to build India's sovereign large language model.
Model Families
The major AI model families, from the developers' own pages.
PrismML released Ternary Bonsai 2 27B, a 5.9GB ternary-weight Qwen3.8 model
PrismML released Ternary Bonsai 2 27B under Apache 2.0, compressing Qwen3.8 27B to 5.9GB with 98.2 percent of its benchmark score.
Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, a 1M-token omni-modal model
Alibaba added Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash to Model Studio, taking text, image, audio and video input across a 1M-token context window.
Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking voice models
Google released Gemini 3.8 Live speech-to-speech models, one of which reasons while it talks, plus Gemini 3.5 Transcribe.
Sakana AI released Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max, models that orchestrate other models
Sakana AI shipped Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max on Sept 11, 2026, orchestrator models that route tasks across a pool of other models.
DeepSeek shipped V4.1-Flash, a 552B-parameter encoder-decoder MoE with native vision
DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash on Sept 10, 2026, a 552B MoE model that beats V4-Pro while activating only 8B/16B parameters.
OpenAI released GPT Image 2.5 in two variants, Sunburst and Flare
OpenAI released GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and Flare in its API on Sept 8, 2026, adding xhigh and max quality settings for image work.
Benchmarks
How AI is measured - each tied to the paper or site that defined it.
WorldBench: A Culturally Grounded Benchmark for Multilingual Agents
1,600 sandbox tasks across seven languages and eight cultures, where frontier models reach only 49.2 percent.
Ai2's BenchMIRT audits what LLM benchmarks actually measure, question by question
Ai2 releases BenchMIRT, an item-response-theory tool that audits LLM benchmarks per question, trained on 100 models and 34,000-plus questions
The First Double-Blind Evaluation of a Frontier Model
Google DeepMind tested a Gemini model against confidential benchmarks inside a cryptographically sealed enclave.
FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion
A cross-domain science benchmark where the best agent configuration finished only 20 of 97 end-to-end workflows.
SWE Refactor Bench: Whole-Repository Stack Migrations for Coding Agents
Twenty whole-repository migrations where only 28 of 520 frontier agent runs passed all three evaluation stages.
ASI-Bench
A 60-task benchmark of project-level scientific research where agent scores fall from 50.91 to 26.62 once methodological guidance is removed.
Facts
Atomic, verifiable facts - every one tied to a primary source.
Gallup put US organizational AI adoption at 47 percent in July 2026
Gallup's July 20, 2026 release found 47 percent of US employees said their organization had integrated AI tools.
DeepSeek-V4 shipped two models with 1M-token context in April 2026
DeepSeek's April 24, 2026 V4 preview shipped DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, both with a 1M-token context window.
Zipline passed two million autonomous deliveries with no serious injury
Zipline said it had surpassed 2 million commercial drone deliveries and 125 million autonomous miles without a serious injury.
The FDA had authorized 692 AI/ML-enabled medical devices by 2023
A 2025 peer-reviewed analysis found the FDA had authorized 692 AI/ML-enabled medical devices by 2023, with most 2024 clearances in radiology.
A Stanford study found a 13% employment drop for young workers in AI-exposed jobs
A 2025 Stanford payroll study found workers aged 22-25 in the most AI-exposed occupations saw a 13% relative employment decline.
Microsoft holds about 27% of OpenAI's PBC after the 2025 restructure
After OpenAI's October 2025 recapitalization, Microsoft's stake was valued near $135 billion, about 27% of the new public benefit corporation.