2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to David Baker for computational protein design and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold structure work.
OpenAI releases Swarm, an experimental multi-agent framework
OpenAI published Swarm, an educational framework for lightweight multi-agent orchestration built on agents and handoffs, later succeeded by the Agents SDK.
Google signs a nuclear SMR deal with Kairos Power
Google's October 2024 deal with Kairos Power for up to 500 MW from small modular reactors was the first corporate SMR purchase to power AI data centers.
Amazon invests in X-energy small modular reactors
In October 2024 Amazon backed X-energy and a Washington SMR project targeting 320 MW expandable to 960 MW, tying nuclear power to its AI data center growth.
Concord v Anthropic: music publishers' lyrics suit and AI guardrails
Music publishers sued Anthropic in 2024 over song lyrics in Claude; the case produced an early court-blessed deal on AI output guardrails.
Computer Use: AI agents that operate software
Anthropic gave Claude the ability to use a computer in 2024; OpenAI's Operator followed, turning AI agents into systems that click, type, and scroll.
OSI releases the Open Source AI Definition 1.0
The Open Source Initiative published the first official definition of open-source AI, requiring the freedoms to use, study, modify, and share.
xAI builds Colossus, a 100,000-GPU cluster, in 122 days
In 2024 xAI stood up Colossus, a Memphis supercomputer with 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, in 122 days and began training Grok within weeks.
Physical Intelligence releases pi0, a generalist robot foundation model
Physical Intelligence's pi0 used flow matching on a vision-language backbone to control eight robot types on tasks like folding laundry.
Big Sleep Finds a Real Vulnerability
Google's Big Sleep agent found a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety bug in SQLite, a first for an AI agent in real software.
Microsoft releases Magentic-One, a generalist multi-agent system
Microsoft Research unveiled Magentic-One, where an Orchestrator agent directs web, file, coding, and terminal agents using a task and progress ledger.
TSMC wins a $6.6 billion CHIPS Act award for Arizona fabs
In 2024 the US finalized up to $6.6 billion in CHIPS Act funding for TSMC's $65 billion plan to build three leading-edge chip fabs in Arizona.
Biden and Xi affirm human control of nuclear weapons
At the 2024 APEC summit, the US and Chinese presidents jointly affirmed that humans, not AI, should control decisions to use nuclear weapons.
Recursion and Exscientia merge into one AI drug-discovery company
In November 2024 Recursion and Exscientia, two leading AI drug-discovery firms, combined in an all-stock deal making Exscientia a Recursion subsidiary.
The International Network of AI Safety Institutes
In November 2024, ten governments launched a network of AI safety institutes in San Francisco to coordinate testing of advanced AI models.
Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol
Anthropic releases the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI applications to external data and tools.
Allen Institute for AI releases OLMo 2
Ai2 releases OLMo 2 in 7B and 13B sizes as fully open models, publishing weights, training data, code, recipes, and intermediate checkpoints.
Alibaba releases QwQ-32B-Preview, an open reasoning model
Alibaba's Qwen team releases QwQ-32B-Preview, an open-weight reasoning model that thinks step by step, as an early open answer to OpenAI's o1.
Hugging Face releases smolagents with code-as-action architecture
Hugging Face released smolagents, an agent framework where agents reason and act through Python code snippets rather than JSON tool calls, achieving 30% fewer execution steps with a minimal ~1,000-line core.
GenCast brings AI ensemble forecasting to weather prediction
DeepMind's GenCast, a diffusion-based ensemble model, beat the leading physics forecast on 97.2 percent of targets.
ARC Prize 2024
A $1M competition to beat the ARC-AGI reasoning benchmark; the grand prize went unclaimed but the state of the art jumped from 33% to 55.5%.
Google launches Gemini 2.0 for the agentic era
Google introduces Gemini 2.0 Flash with native image and audio output, native tool use, and agent prototypes Project Astra and Project Mariner.
Google launches Gemini Deep Research
Google shipped Deep Research in Gemini in December 2024, an agent that plans, browses, and writes a sourced report in minutes.
UK consults on copyright and AI training
The UK government opened a consultation proposing a text-and-data-mining exception with a rights-reservation opt-out for AI training.
OpenAI o3 and the ARC-AGI breakthrough
OpenAI previews o3, a reasoning model that scores 75.7 and 87.5 percent on the ARC-AGI-1 benchmark, where GPT-4o had managed about 5 percent.
xAI raises a 6-billion-dollar Series C
In December 2024 xAI announced a 6 billion dollar Series C at a 45 billion dollar valuation, with NVIDIA and AMD among the strategic investors.
Microsoft plans 80 billion dollars of AI data-center spending for fiscal 2025
Microsoft said in January 2025 it was on track to invest about 80 billion dollars in AI-enabled data centers in fiscal 2025, over half in the US.
MatterGen generates new materials to order
Microsoft published MatterGen in 2025, a generative AI that designs new crystals from target properties, with one compound made in the lab.
The Stargate Project
OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced Stargate in 2025, a company intending to invest 500 billion dollars over four years in US AI infrastructure.
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-R1
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-R1, an open reasoning model trained largely via reinforcement learning, intensifying global LLM competition.
OpenAI launches Operator and the Computer-Using Agent
OpenAI's Operator, launched January 2025, used a vision-and-reasoning model to click and type inside a real web browser for you.
Trump Revokes the Biden AI Executive Order (2025)
President Trump signs an executive order revoking Biden's AI order and directing an action plan to secure American AI dominance.
US Executive Order 14179: Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI (2025)
Trump signed Executive Order 14179 on 23 January 2025, the affirmative AI directive accompanying EO 14110's revocation and calling for a national AI strategy.
Copyright Office AI Report Part 2: Copyrightability
The US Copyright Office reaffirmed that purely AI-generated output is not copyrightable and that prompts alone do not make a human the author.
Meta guides to 60-65 billion dollars of capex for 2025
In its 2024 results Meta reported 39 billion dollars of capital spending and guided to 60-65 billion for 2025, almost all driven by AI infrastructure.
The first International AI Safety Report (2025)
Chaired by Yoshua Bengio and mandated by over 30 countries, the first International AI Safety Report (2025) assessed the risks of advanced AI.
OpenAI launches Deep Research
OpenAI's Deep Research, launched February 2025 on a version of o3, runs multi-step web research and writes analyst-grade reports.
The Anthropic Economic Index
In 2025 Anthropic began measuring how people use Claude across occupations, reporting 57% augmentation versus 43% automation in its first release.
FTC settles with DoNotPay over 'robot lawyer' claims
The FTC finalized an order against DoNotPay, the self-styled 'world's first robot lawyer,' for deceptive AI claims, with $193,000 in relief.
The Paris AI Action Summit (2025)
At the February 2025 Paris AI Action Summit, around sixty countries signed a statement on inclusive AI; the US and UK declined to sign.
Thomson Reuters v. Ross: the first US AI-training fair-use ruling
A federal judge ruled that a legal-AI startup infringed Westlaw's copyrights by training on its headnotes and rejected its fair-use defense.
Harvey raises a $300M Series D at a $3B valuation
Legal-AI startup Harvey raised 300 million dollars in February 2025 at a 3 billion dollar valuation, with Sequoia leading and customers up to 235 firms.
Google's AI co-scientist
A 2025 multi-agent system built on Gemini that generates and refines research hypotheses, with some predictions confirmed in the lab.
Anthropic releases Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its first hybrid reasoning model
Anthropic ships Claude 3.7 Sonnet, billed as the first hybrid reasoning model, with a toggleable extended thinking mode, and previews Claude Code.
ECMWF puts an AI weather model into operations
On 25 February 2025 ECMWF made AIFS its first operational machine-learning forecast, running about 1,000 times more energy-efficiently than physics models.
Sutton and Barto win the 2024 Turing Award for reinforcement learning
ACM gave Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton the 2024 Turing Award for the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning.
MIT and OpenAI study how emotional ChatGPT use affects wellbeing
A 2025 MIT-OpenAI study ran a four-week trial with 981 users and found heavier ChatGPT use linked to more loneliness and emotional dependence.
NIST publishes an Adversarial Machine Learning taxonomy (NIST AI 100-2)
NIST's AI 100-2 gave the field a common taxonomy of adversarial ML attacks: evasion, poisoning, privacy, and abuse, with mitigations.