Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts propose the first artifical neuron model — laying the groundwork for the study of neural networks.

Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, and early natural language processing system that could carry out minimal conversations.

Five different teams engineer autonomous vehicles which complete a 212-kilometer offroad driving challenge in the Mojave desert, serving as a proof of concept for the viability of self-driving cars.

Dozens of the world’s top scientists and leaders, including Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, and Elon Musk, sign a letter warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

The transformer architecture is invented, leading to a proliferation of advanced language models including Google’s BERT and OpenAI’s GPT models.

For decades, predicting protein structures accurately from amino acid sequences was an unsolved computational challenge, widely known as the protein folding problem. DeepMind’s AlphaFold system made a major breakthrough by leveraging deep learning, dramatically improving the accuracy of protein structure prediction.

NATO, the military alliance of over thirty countries, announced its 18-point military strategy as well as a $1 billion “future-proofing” fund that will eventually be invested in AI technology with military applications.

Microsoft deploys its new Bing chatbot, internally referred to as Sydney, on the internet. Soon, it’s revealed to have been insufficiently developed and tested for intended behavior — acting erratically and infamously declaring its love for a New York Times journalist and threatening users with blackmail.

Despite this model not having the capacity to carry out those actions, and such behavior eventually being fixed, the premature public release of the model serves as a worrying signal of a lack of corporate oversight.

World governments scramble to make sense of the increasing capabilities of AI, including the United States, where congressional hearings are held to identify crucial considerations for AI regulation.

In the testimony from Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO warns that “regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”