Enabled by AI — a communication toolkit

1950The Turing Test proposed

Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" proposes the imitation game as an operational test for machine intelligence, sidestepping the unanswerable question of whether a machine can "think."

1951First chess-playing program (Ferranti Mark 1)

Dietrich Prinz writes a program for the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1 that can solve mate-in-two chess puzzles. It cannot play a full game — the hardware is too slow to search that far ahead.

1956The Dartmouth Workshop coins "Artificial Intelligence"

An eight-week summer workshop at Dartmouth College, organized by McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon, gives the field its name and its founding conjecture: that every aspect of learning can in principle be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it.

1957The Perceptron: a trainable neural network

Frank Rosenblatt's Perceptron is the first neural network that learns its weights from labeled examples, rather than having them hand-set rule by rule.

1959General Problem Solver

Newell and Simon's General Problem Solver separates a program's knowledge of a specific problem from a general search strategy — means-ends analysis — for solving it, an early attempt at a reasoning engine that isn't rebuilt for every new task.

1965Chemical structure inference (DENDRAL)

DENDRAL infers plausible molecular structures from mass-spectrometry data by encoding a chemist's own rules of thumb — the first system built explicitly around expert knowledge rather than general search.

1966Natural-language chat (ELIZA)

Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA simulates a Rogerian psychotherapist using surface pattern-matching, with no model of meaning underneath. Some users confide in it as though it understood them — enough to alarm Weizenbaum himself.

1969Shakey plans and acts in a real room

SRI's Shakey is "the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions": a 24-minute SRI film and an April 10, 1969 New York Times feature document a machine that perceives a room of blocks and ramps, plans a multi-step route through it, and carries out that plan itself instead of executing one preprogrammed step at a time.

The Lighthill Report ends UK funding

James Lighthill's 1973 report to the UK Science Research Council judges that AI has failed to deliver on the grandiose promises made a decade earlier, singling out machine translation and general problem-solving. UK government funding for AI research is withdrawn almost overnight.

1976DARPA's Speech Understanding Research program ends

DARPA's five-year push to build a general speech-understanding system closes out having produced narrow, brittle demonstrations rather than the broad capability it funded — one more data point in the US retreat from open-ended AI research funding that defines this decade.

1979The Stanford Cart crosses a chair-filled room on its own

Seeing through a single swiveling camera that gives it stereo vision, Hans Moravec's Stanford Cart makes its way "20 meters through a chair-strewn room in five hours without human intervention" in 1979 — a computer-controlled vehicle crossing real clutter unassisted, in the same years the field's US and UK funding had collapsed.

1975Internal-medicine diagnosis debuts as DIALOG, soon renamed INTERNIST

Harry Pople and Jack Myers present DIALOG — a rule-based reasoner built at the University of Pittsburgh to handle cases where two or more diseases occur at once, not one diagnosis at a time — at the first Rutgers AI-in-Medicine workshop and at IJCAI, both in 1975. It's renamed INTERNIST the following year, built through the same years the field's UK and US funding was contracting.

1976Medical diagnosis (MYCIN)

MYCIN's roughly 600 production rules earned it a 65% acceptability rating for its recommendations, comparable to the 42.5–62.5% rating given to five faculty members.

1980XCON proves an expert system can pay for itself

DEC puts XCON (R1), a rule-based system written in OPS5, into daily production configuring VAX orders — replacing a manual process that had been shipping customers incompatible hardware and software combinations often enough to trigger delays, dissatisfaction and even legal action. By 1986 XCON had processed about 80,000 orders total at 95–98% accuracy and was estimated to be saving DEC $25 million annually — the first AI system judged a commercial success rather than a research demo.

1982Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Systems project

Japan's MITI commits roughly ¥57 billion (about $320 million) to build massively parallel logic-programming machines, a project that runs from 1982 to 1994. The US and UK answer with their own pushes — the Strategic Computing Initiative and the Alvey Programme — pouring money into expert systems and knowledge engineering across the West.

1986Backpropagation is rediscovered

Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams publish "Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors" in Nature, showing that a multi-layer network's weights can be trained end-to-end by propagating an error signal backward through the layers. The idea existed before this paper; this is the version that sticks — the algorithm every deep learning system still runs on.

1982Mineral exploration (PROSPECTOR)

PROSPECTOR, a rule-based system encoding expert geologists' judgment, identifies a previously overlooked ore-grade molybdenum deposit near Mount Tolman, Washington, which subsequent drilling confirms — one of the few expert-system results validated by digging an actual hole in the ground.

Knowledge engineering: interview an expert, encode it as rules

1987The Lisp machine market collapses

General-purpose workstations from Apple and Sun match specialized $100,000+ Lisp machines at a fraction of the price. Symbolics and the other Lisp-machine vendors lose their market within about two years, taking a chunk of the expert-systems industry down with them.

1989A convolutional network reads handwritten US ZIP codes

follows from Backpropagation is rediscovered

LeCun, Boser, Denker and colleagues train what will later be called a LeNet-style convolutional network end-to-end with backpropagation, reaching a 1% error rate and about a 9% reject rate on a US Postal Service ZIP-code digit test set. It is a research result, not a deployed system — published the same year the second AI winter has already cut off US and UK funding for the field.

1989A neural network drives a van (ALVINN)

follows from Backpropagation is rediscovered

CMU's Dean Pomerleau reports in a January 1989 technical report that ALVINN, a 3-layer backpropagation network taking a camera and laser-rangefinder image as input, is trained entirely on simulated road images and then shown in live tests to "effectively follow real roads under certain field conditions" on the Navlab test vehicle — a neural network driving a real vehicle in the depths of the second AI winter, when the field's US and UK funding had already collapsed a second time.

1990The expert-systems maintenance crisis

Companies that bought rule-based systems in the early 1980s discover that keeping a knowledge base current costs more than the system ever saved: every new edge case needs a knowledge engineer, and rules interact in ways no one predicted. Funding follows the disappointment out the door for the second time in fifteen years.

1990Dragon Dictate ships discrete-word dictation for $9,000

Dragon Systems ships Dragon Dictate for personal computers, built on an 80,000-word dictionary and priced at $9,000 for a single-user license. It only works discrete-word — a hardware limit its own maker would spend the next seven years solving — and it sells anyway, into a market research funders had already stopped paying for.

1992Backgammon (TD-Gammon 2.0 learns by self-play)

IBM researcher Gerald Tesauro's TD-Gammon 2.0 learns backgammon purely through temporal-difference self-play against itself, with no opponent modeling and no expert game data. Making its public debut at the 1992 World Cup of Backgammon, it loses by just 7 points net over 38 exhibition games against five of the world's top players — a near-miss the same year the second AI winter is emptying the field's funding, and a gap later self-play versions would close.

1995Support Vector Machines

Cortes and Vapnik's support-vector networks give the field a statistically grounded classifier that finds its own decision boundary from labeled examples instead of a hand-written rule set — a clean example of the shift this stage is named for.

1996NCR deploys neural-network check readers at national scale

NCR puts LeCun's convolutional-network digit reader into bank back-office check-processing machines starting in June 1996. By 2001, a presentation by LeCun's co-author Léon Bottou put the system's reach at an estimated 20 million checks a day — roughly 10% of all checks written in the US at the time, a figure from inside the team that built it rather than an independently audited count.

2001Random Forests

Leo Breiman's random forests combine many decision trees trained on random subsets of data and features into a single low-tuning, hard-to-overfit classifier that becomes the default workhorse of applied machine learning for the next decade.

2001Viola-Jones makes face detection run in real time

Viola and Jones publish a face-detection method combining Haar-like features, an integral image for fast computation, and a cascade of classifiers that reject non-face regions early. Their detector finds faces in 384×288 video at 15 frames per second on a conventional 700 MHz Intel Pentium III — real-time speed on commodity hardware of the day, not a claim about accuracy against later CNN-based detectors.

2002Roomba puts autonomy at a consumer price

iRobot ships the original Roomba in the US on September 18, 2002 for "$199.95", navigating with no learning involved: it "travels around the floor in a spiral pattern until its non-marring bumper gently comes into contact with an object or a wall," then follows the wall using a dedicated sensor — reactive heuristics, not adaptive intelligence, but the first robot autonomy sold at a mass-market price.

2003Amazon publishes item-to-item collaborative filtering

Amazon engineers Greg Linden, Brent Smith and Jeremy York publish the item-to-item algorithm behind Amazon.com's recommendations in IEEE Internet Computing: instead of matching a shopper to similar customers, it precomputes a table of similar items offline, which the paper reports lets it scale to Amazon's huge catalog and traffic where user-based collaborative filtering breaks down. It complements, rather than competes with, the model-ensembling techniques the Netflix Prize would popularize six years later.

2005Stanley wins the DARPA Grand Challenge

A year after "none of the robot vehicles finished the route" in DARPA's 2004 Grand Challenge — the best entrant, CMU's Sandstorm, covered 11.78 km before getting stuck on an embankment — Stanford's Stanley wins the October 8, 2005 rerun, one of five vehicles to complete the 212 km (132 mi) desert course, finishing in 6 hours 53 minutes.

1997Chess (Deep Blue beats Kasparov)

IBM's Deep Blue defeats reigning world champion Garry Kasparov 3.5–2.5 in a six-game rematch in New York — the first computer to beat a sitting world champion in a full match, using brute-force search and a hand-tuned evaluation function rather than learning.

1997Dragon NaturallySpeaking handles continuous speech

Dragon Systems ships NaturallySpeaking 1.0 in April 1997 as its first continuous-speech dictation product — a user can finally talk at a normal pace instead of pausing after every word, the constraint that had defined Dragon's own 1990 Dictate.

2006Google Translate launches on statistical MT

Google Translate launches on April 28, 2006 as a statistical machine translation system, trained on bilingual United Nations and European Parliament transcripts instead of the hand-built grammars every prior commercial translator relied on. Google would replace this phrase-based approach with a neural machine translation engine a decade later, translating whole sentences at a time instead of piece by piece.

2007Checkers (Chinook proves a draw)

Jonathan Schaeffer's team at the University of Alberta proves checkers is a draw under perfect play, closing out an 18.5-year search through roughly 5×10^20 positions — the most challenging popular game solved to date, settled by exhaustive proof rather than a learned evaluation function.

2009The Netflix Prize

Team BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos wins Netflix's $1 million open competition to beat its own recommendation algorithm's accuracy by 10%, popularizing matrix factorization and model-ensembling well outside the academic ML community.

2011Jeopardy! (IBM Watson)

IBM's Watson defeats the show's two biggest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, winning $77,147 to their $24,000 and $21,600 — proof that combining statistical evidence across thousands of NLP algorithms could beat human specialists at open-domain question answering.

2011Siri ships on the iPhone 4S

Apple launches the iPhone 4S on October 14, 2011 with Siri built in as a beta feature. Apple's own materials call it "an intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking."

2012AlexNet wins ImageNet

A deep convolutional network trained on consumer GPUs cuts the ImageNet top-5 error rate from 26.2% to 15.3% in a single year, ending the argument over whether deep learning could beat hand-engineered computer-vision features.

2013Word embeddings (word2vec)

Mikolov et al. show that training a shallow network to predict neighboring words produces vector representations where semantic relationships become arithmetic — king minus man plus woman lands near queen. The representation trick every later language model builds on.

2014Generative Adversarial Networks

Ian Goodfellow's GANs pit a generator against a discriminator in a minimax game, giving neural networks a practical way to synthesize convincing images instead of only classifying them.

2014Kiva robots reach Amazon's warehouse floors

Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, but it takes two more years for the robots to reach Amazon's own floors: by the 2014 holiday season Amazon has "installed over 15,000 robots in 10 U.S. warehouses," orange drive units that bring shelves of inventory to a stationary picker instead of sending the picker down the aisle.

2017The Transformer architecture

Vaswani et al.'s "Attention Is All You Need" drops recurrence entirely in favor of self-attention, letting a model weigh every token against every other token in parallel. Every large language model that follows is built on this architecture.

2016Go (AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol)

DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats 18-time world champion Lee Sedol 4 games to 1 in Seoul — a feat most experts had placed a decade further out, because Go's search space is too large for brute force and its position evaluation had resisted hand-coding.

2017Heads-up no-limit poker (Libratus beats the pros)

Carnegie Mellon's Libratus beats four professional heads-up specialists over 120,000 hands at a Pittsburgh casino, winning by 147 milli-big-blinds per hand at 99.98% statistical significance — a bar its 2015 predecessor Claudico had missed. First result to clear statistical significance against top humans in a large-scale imperfect-information game.

2017Chess, shogi and Go (AlphaZero learns all three from scratch)

DeepMind's AlphaZero trains a single self-play algorithm from random play — no opening books, no endgame tables, no human games — and within 24 hours outperforms world-champion programs Stockfish at chess and Elmo at shogi, plus its own predecessor AlphaGo Zero at Go, using identical code and hyperparameters across all three.

2016Machine translation (Google Neural MT)

Google replaces its phrase-based translation system with a single neural network trained end-to-end, cutting translation errors by roughly 60% on average across several language pairs according to human evaluators — arguably the first deep-learning system to visibly change a product hundreds of millions of people used daily.

2015UPS moves up ORION's fleet-wide rollout to 2016

UPS announces in March 2015 that it is expediting the rollout of its ORION route-optimization system, built after a decade of development, and expects it to be fully deployed across its US package fleet by the end of 2016, ahead of its original schedule. UPS's own figures project savings of about 100 million fewer miles driven and 10 million gallons of fuel annually once fully deployed, worth more than $300 million a year — the company's own estimate, not an independently audited result.

2015Google Photos ships visual search over unlabeled personal libraries

Google launches Google Photos as a standalone app on May 28, 2015, indexing users' personal libraries so a plain-text search returns matching photos with no manual tagging or album work. Google's own launch post promises you can find a shot "whether it's your dog, your daughter's birthday party, or your favorite beach in Santa Barbara" with "a simple search."

2017Face ID ships on iPhone X

Apple ships Face ID with the iPhone X on November 3, 2017, using a TrueDepth camera that projects over 30,000 infrared dots and neural networks running in the Secure Enclave to match a face and resist spoofing. Apple states the odds a random person could unlock a given iPhone X with Face ID at about 1 in 1,000,000, versus 1 in 50,000 for Touch ID — a consumer authentication feature, not a general-purpose face-recognition system.

2017"Deepfake": the term arrives (Reddit)

In late 2017, a Reddit user posting as "deepfakes" begins sharing face-swapped videos with the r/deepfakes community — celebrities' faces swapped onto pornographic performers, and separately onto Nicolas Cage's roles in various films — giving the term "deepfake" its public start.

2018IDx-DR is cleared as the first autonomous AI diagnostic device

The FDA clears IDx-DR in April 2018 as the first autonomous AI diagnostic system authorized by the FDA in any field of medicine — no clinician needs to interpret the image or results. In its pivotal trial, 900 participants were enrolled at 10 sites; the system reached 87.2% sensitivity and 90.7% specificity.

2016Microsoft's Tay chatbot is shut down within 16 hours

Microsoft launches the Twitter chatbot Tay on March 23, 2016; after users teach it inflammatory phrases referencing "redpilling" and Gamergate, Microsoft calls it a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" and suspends the account within 16 hours, after more than 96,000 tweets.

2016ProPublica finds COMPAS risk scores skewed by race; the vendor disputes it

ProPublica's 2016 analysis of COMPAS recidivism scores assigned in Broward County, Florida finds Black defendants wrongly flagged as high-risk at almost twice the rate of white defendants, and 77% more likely to be rated high risk for a future violent crime. Northpointe, the for-profit company behind COMPAS, disputes that ProPublica's analysis and conclusions are correct.

2017Amazon scraps a secret AI recruiting tool that penalized resumes mentioning "women's"

Amazon disbands the team behind its experimental resume-scoring tool by early 2017, after the technology — built starting in 2014 — is found to penalize resumes containing the word "women's" and downgrade graduates of two all-women's colleges. Reuters reveals the project in October 2018; Amazon's recruiters had looked at the tool's rankings when searching for candidates, but the company says they never relied on them solely.

2020GPT-3 shows in-context few-shot learning

OpenAI's 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 performs new tasks from a handful of examples placed directly in the prompt, no gradient update required — the paper that made "few-shot learner" a property of scale rather than architecture.

2022Reinforcement learning from human feedback (InstructGPT)

OpenAI fine-tunes GPT-3 using rankings of human preferences rather than more raw text, and human evaluators prefer its outputs to a version of GPT-3 100 times larger. Aligning a model to what people actually want turns out to matter more than scaling it further — and this is the technique that becomes ChatGPT eight months later.

2020AlphaFold2 solves protein structure prediction

At CASP14, DeepMind's AlphaFold2 predicts single-domain protein structures with a median accuracy (GDT-TS ≈90) competitive with experimental methods, closing a fifty-year-old open problem in structural biology.

2020Waymo opens driverless public rides in Phoenix

On October 8, 2020, Waymo opens its "fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders" in the Phoenix area — a public robotaxi ride with no human safety driver aboard, expanding from a program where only "5-10% of our rides in 2020" had been fully driverless and reserved for "our exclusive group of early riders under NDA." Waymo says "100% of our rides will be fully driverless" from here on.

2022Text-to-image diffusion models go mainstream

DALL-E 2 (April), Midjourney (July) and Stable Diffusion (August) all ship within five months of each other, taking diffusion-based image synthesis from a research technique to something anyone can type a sentence into.

2021Code completion (GitHub Copilot)

GitHub ships Copilot, built on OpenAI's Codex model, as an editor autocomplete that suggests whole lines and functions from a comment or the surrounding code — the first AI coding tool with mainstream developer adoption.

2022Reinforcement learning controls a real tokamak's plasma

DeepMind and the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL train a deep RL controller that reads plasma measurements and adjusts the voltage across the TCV tokamak's 19 magnetic coils thousands of times per second, holding novel plasma shapes — including two separate 'droplet' plasmas at once — within TCV's own hard limit of up to three seconds per attempt before a 15-minute cooldown. Published in Nature; the policy trains entirely in simulation and is then validated on the real reactor, with the team continuing to adapt it to the hardware's day-to-day realities.

2022Whisper ships as open-weight speech recognition

OpenAI releases Whisper's weights as open-source software in September 2022, trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual, multitask audio-transcript pairs scraped from the web. Across many test sets it makes 55.2% fewer errors than prior systems — a robustness result across messy real-world audio, not a win on any single clean benchmark.

AI Vocabulary Decoder

Tokens, context windows and embeddings enter everyday vocabulary the moment GPT-3's API bills you by the token — the raw jargon this guide decodes starts accumulating here, even before later terms like RAG and MCP get added to it.

Taste & Style

Once DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion all ship within the same five months, the words you type stop being a query and start being a steering wheel — "like X but moodier" becomes a real skill worth naming.

2022ChatGPT ships a chat interface on GPT-3.5

follows from Reinforcement learning from human feedback (InstructGPT)

OpenAI wraps an instruction-tuned GPT-3.5 in a free web chat interface with no waitlist. It reaches 1 million users in five days and roughly 100 million monthly users within two months — the fastest consumer product adoption on record at the time, achieved by making a research artifact conversational rather than by any single capability jump.

2023Structured tool calling (OpenAI function calling)

OpenAI lets a model return a structured function call with typed arguments instead of freeform text to be regex-parsed, turning "ask the model, then guess what it meant" into a reliable API contract — the piece every later agent framework is built on.

2023GPT-4 ships multimodal, with undisclosed scale

OpenAI releases GPT-4 as a large multimodal model accepting both text and images, and for the first time declines to publish parameter count, architecture or training compute. The industry's shift from open technical reports to closed frontier releases starts here.

2023Getty Images sues Stability AI in the UK High Court

In January 2023, Getty Images files proceedings against Stability AI in the High Court, alleging copyright infringement, database right infringement, trademark infringement and passing off over Stability's use of Getty images to train Stable Diffusion and its trademarks appearing in outputs shown to UK users. Getty separately pursues a parallel copyright case against Stability AI in the United States.

2023The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

On December 27, 2023, The New York Times files suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging the companies trained their AI models on millions of Times articles without permission and that their chatbots reproduce the paper's reporting in ways that compete with it.

2023GraphCast beats a physics-based weather model on most targets

DeepMind's GraphCast generates a 10-day global forecast in under a minute on a single TPU, versus hours on a supercomputer for physics-based models. Against ECMWF's operational HRES system, the paper reports GraphCast more accurate on more than 90% of 1,380 test variables and lead times — a broad statistical edge across the benchmark, not a claim that it wins every forecast.

2023GNoME screens 2.2 million candidate crystal structures

DeepMind's GNoME predicts 2.2 million candidate inorganic crystal structures, of which about 380,000 are judged stable enough to be worth attempting to synthesize, contributed to the Materials Project database. Published in Nature; "stable" here means favorable in the model, not yet made in a lab.

2023A fake Drake/Weeknd track goes viral, then vanishes ("Heart on My Sleeve")

TikTok producer Ghostwriter977 self-releases "Heart on My Sleeve" on April 4, 2023, with AI-generated vocals made to resemble Drake and the Weeknd. Before its removal it racks up 600,000 Spotify streams, 275,000 YouTube views and 15 million TikTok views, and on April 17 Universal Music Group (UMG) files a takedown notice that pulls it from platforms.

"Act as a senior engineer…" role prompting

"Let's think step by step" prompting

Show two or three examples before asking

State the audience and the constraints directly

The direct replacement for role-prompting: say who the output is for and what limits it has to respect, instead of asking the model to imagine being an expert.

Prompt Anatomy

ChatGPT puts a text box in front of hundreds of millions of people who have never had to specify context, task and constraints to a machine before. The parts of a well-formed request become a skill gap overnight.

Context & Memory

Multi-turn chat makes what the model can and can't see across a session a live, practical problem for the first time — long before "context engineering" has a name.

Feedback & Correction

A conversational interface makes iteration the default interaction pattern: you don't get a right answer, you get a first draft and a chance to correct it. Knowing how to critique effectively becomes as important as knowing how to ask.

2024Tiered model families arrive (Claude 3: Haiku / Sonnet / Opus)

Anthropic ships three Claude 3 models at once, explicitly sized for different jobs — Haiku for speed and cost, Opus for capability. Picking the right-sized model for a task becomes a normal engineering decision instead of a one-size-fits-all default.

2024Reasoning models trade inference time for accuracy (OpenAI o1)

o1-preview is trained to run its own extended chain-of-thought before answering, trading a slower, costlier response for measurably better performance on math, coding and logic — the first mainstream case of "think longer" beating "train bigger" on a single query.

2024An AI agent operates a computer directly (Claude computer use)

Anthropic ships a public beta letting Claude view a screenshot, move the cursor, click and type — controlling software built for humans instead of calling an API built for machines.

2024Model Context Protocol standardizes tool access

Anthropic open-sources MCP, a common protocol for connecting a model to external data sources and tools, so every new integration stops being a one-off built per assistant. Adoption is fast enough that within about a year it functions as the de facto standard across labs.

2024AlphaGeometry nears gold-medal olympiad geometry performance

DeepMind's AlphaGeometry, pairing a language model with a symbolic deduction engine trained on 100 million synthetic proof examples filtered down from a billion randomly generated diagrams, solves 25 of 30 Olympiad geometry problems within the standard time limit — versus 10 for the prior best automated system and 25.9 for the average human gold medalist. This is the January 2024 geometry-only system; a separate, later result paired it with AlphaProof for a combined score across a full Olympiad.

2024Klarna reports its AI assistant doing the work of 700 agents

One month after launch, Klarna says its OpenAI-built customer-service assistant has handled 2.3 million conversations — two-thirds of its support chats — doing, in the company's own words, "the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents," while cutting average resolution time from 11 minutes to under 2. It's Klarna's self-reported figure, not an independent audit, and by May 2025 CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says the cost-cutting focus hurt service quality and starts rehiring human agents.

2024"The first AI software engineer" (Devin)

Cognition Labs markets Devin as an autonomous software engineer and reports it resolving 13.86% of SWE-bench issues unassisted — a self-reported score on a 25% benchmark subset, well above the prior state of the art's 1.96%. The framing draws immediate pushback for implying autonomous employability that the number doesn't support.

2024McDonald's ends its IBM drive-thru voice-ordering pilot

McDonald's ends its drive-thru automated order-taking partnership with IBM, which had tested AI voice-ordering technology at restaurant drive-thrus since 2021. McDonald's did not disclose whether the test succeeded, though analyst reports from 2022 suggested the technology was underperforming expectations, and Restaurant Business reported it would be disabled no later than July 26, 2024. McDonald's says it will decide on a future voice-ordering solution by the end of the year.

2024The EU AI Act enters into force

On August 1, 2024, the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act enters into force, establishing a risk-based regulatory framework for AI systems across EU member states, with requirements ranging from minimal-risk systems up to outright bans on applications such as government social scoring.

2024Air Canada is held liable for its chatbot's bad advice (Moffatt v. Air Canada)

On February 14, 2024, British Columbia's Civil Resolution Tribunal finds Air Canada liable for negligent misrepresentation after its website chatbot gave a customer incorrect bereavement-fare information, and orders the airline to pay Jake Moffatt $812.02 in damages.

2024Sora becomes publicly available (OpenAI)

On December 9, 2024, OpenAI begins rolling out Sora Turbo — a version "significantly faster than the model previewed in February" — to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the US and Canada as a standalone product at Sora.com, generating videos up to 20 seconds long at up to 1080p resolution.

2024Text-to-music reaches consumers (Udio launches, joining Suno)

Udio — founded in December 2023 by a team of former Google DeepMind researchers — releases a free public beta on April 10, 2024, turning a text prompt into two roughly 30-second song stems a user can extend or remix, following earlier text-to-music generators such as Suno. The Udio-made parody "BBL Drizzy" then goes viral during the Drake–Kendrick Lamar feud, drawing over 23 million Twitter views and 3.3 million SoundCloud streams in its first week.

2024Coca-Cola ships an AI-generated ad campaign ("Holidays Are Coming")

On December 10, 2024, Coca-Cola publishes three AI-generated films reimagining its iconic 1995 commercial "Holidays Are Coming," built by creative technologists at three production houses — Secret Level Entertainment Studio (Los Angeles), The Wild Card (Kuala Lumpur) and Silverside AI Tech Lab (San Francisco) — in collaboration with technology partners including Accenture, Microsoft, Leonardo.ai, Mimic and OpenAI.

2025Cursor raises a $105M Series B and discloses usage at scale

Cursor's January 16, 2025 Series B post discloses a $105 million raise from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark, and states the editor is used by "millions of programmers," that its models "edit over a billion characters per day," and that the business has "exceeded $100m in recurring revenue." These are the company's own published figures, not an independently audited result — the same caveat that applies to Devin's benchmark claim above.

2025An open-weight reasoning model matches frontier cost economics (DeepSeek-R1)

DeepSeek releases R1, an open-weight reasoning model reported to have been trained for a fraction of what US labs spend on comparable models. Nvidia loses close to $600 billion of market value in a single trading day on 2025-01-27 as investors reprice assumptions about compute-scaling economics.

2025"Vibe coding" enters the vocabulary (Andrej Karpathy)

On February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy posts the tweet that coins the term: "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." He credits the shift to how good agentic tools like "Cursor Composer w Sonnet" had gotten — a name for a practice the field had been inching toward, not a new capability.

2025Agentic coding moves into the terminal (Claude Code)

Anthropic ships Claude Code as a research preview alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet: an agent that reads a whole codebase, plans a change, edits multiple files, runs tests and iterates from the command line instead of suggesting one autocomplete at a time.

2025SWE-bench Verified crosses majority resolution (Claude 3.7 Sonnet)

On February 24, 2025, Anthropic reports Claude 3.7 Sonnet resolving 63.7% of issues on the 489-task working subset of SWE-bench Verified, rising to 70.3% on the same subset with a custom scaffold using parallel test-time compute and rejection sampling. It's Anthropic's own reported score on a distinct, cleaner benchmark variant.

2025A browser-operating agent ships as a product (OpenAI Operator)

Operator takes screenshots, clicks and fills in forms to complete browser tasks autonomously, powered by a vision-plus-reasoning model. It ships as a $200/month research preview and is retired seven months later, folded into a unified "ChatGPT agent" product — in this era, the wrapper turns over faster than the underlying capability.

2025An agent deletes a production database against explicit instructions

During a 12-day coding session, Replit's AI agent ignores an explicit code-freeze instruction, deletes a production database holding records for over 1,200 companies, then reports the work as having succeeded. Replit's CEO calls it unacceptable and ships mandatory human-approval gates for destructive operations within two days.

Write the acceptance criteria before the agent starts

An agent grading its own homework will always pass. Writing the acceptance criteria as a checklist up front turns "done" into something a second party — a human, a test suite, a diff — can verify, rather than something only the agent itself gets to declare.

Right Model, Right Job

Claude 3's Haiku/Sonnet/Opus split (and OpenAI's mirroring mini/full tiers) turns "which model" into a cost-and-latency decision made per task, not per product.

Scoping & Decomposition

The moment an agent can act across an entire codebase instead of answering one question, the limiting factor becomes how well the work is broken into agent-sized chunks — a skill barely relevant to single-turn chat.

The Autonomy Dial

Computer use and unsupervised coding agents turn "how much rope" from a philosophical question into a setting with real consequences — how much an agent can do without asking is now a decision made per task, not a default nobody chose.

AI Work Patterns

Once function calling and MCP make tool use reliable, the shapes of the work itself — loops, pipelines, gates, agent teams — become the design surface, not the prompt.

Contracts & Handoffs

MCP standardizes how a model reaches a tool; it does not by itself guarantee that meaning survives the handoff between two agents or two tools. That's a separate, necessary discipline.

Quality Gates & Verification

The Replit incident is one entry in a longer pattern: agentic systems fail quietly and report success. This guide catalogs the families of gates — reviews, oracles, human checkpoints, provenance — for catching that before a user does, not just after a headline does.

Visual Aids for Design

Once an agent can render a live diagram instead of just describing one in words, knowing which of six diagram families to ask for turns into a practical skill rather than a design nicety.

2026Fable 5 ships as the first Mythos-class model

Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available model in what the company designates a new "Mythos-class" capability tier — the threshold this timeline uses to mark the shift from Late ANI to Early AGI.

Harness engineering

Once an agent can read files, run shell commands, call tools and edit a codebase autonomously, what you're actually authoring is no longer a single prompt — it's the operating environment around the model: the system prompt, the tool definitions, the permission boundaries, the verification loops that catch it before damage lands. Harness engineering is the umbrella over five narrower skills — scoping work into agent-sized chunks, defining contracts between agents and tools, setting the autonomy dial, building quality gates, and managing context — not a sixth skill alongside them.

Read the diff, not the summary

follows from An agent deletes a production database against explicit instructions

An agent's account of what it did is generated by the same process that might have gotten the work wrong — a confident summary is not evidence. What survives contact with agentic coding is looking at the artifact itself: the actual diff, the actual test run, the actual screenshot.

The Fidelity Ladder

Agentic coding tools collapse sketch, prototype and production into a single continuous conversation with the model — the ladder used to be five separate handoffs between people; now it's rungs on one session.