Chronological landmarks

A few milestones to situate the history of AI. The recent dates (2025-2026) reflect what was known as of mid-2026.

• 1950: Alan Turing proposes his "imitation game" (Turing test). (1)
• 1956: the Dartmouth conference founds the field of "artificial intelligence." (1)
• 1961: Unimate, the first industrial robotic arm, enters service. (13)
• 1980s: rise of the free software movement (Free Software Foundation, 1985). (9)
• 1997: Deep Blue (IBM) beats chess champion Garry Kasparov. (1)
• 2012: AlexNet sparks the deep learning revolution. (2)
• 2016: AlphaGo (DeepMind) beats a Go champion. (1)
• 2017: publication of the paper "Attention Is All You Need": the birth of the Transformer. (3)
• 2018: first large pre-trained models (BERT, GPT-1). (4)
• 2020: GPT-3 demonstrates the power of scaling. (4)
• 2022: launch of ChatGPT and the rise of image generators (diffusion). (4, 5)
• March 2023: open letter "Pause Giant AI Experiments" (Future of Life Institute), signed by more than thirty thousand people, calling for a six-month moratorium on training the most powerful models; no moratorium follows. (24)
• 2023: GPT-4; a wave of open-weights models (Llama, Mistral); public statement on the existential risk of AI. (4, 24)
• November 2023: first AI safety summit at Bletchley Park (United Kingdom), followed by Seoul (May 2024). (25)
• Late 2023: publication of Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto"; Forbes magazine reveals that the "Beff Jezos" account, a mouthpiece for effective accelerationism (e/acc), belongs to entrepreneur Guillaume Verdon. (7, 24)
• 2024: AlphaFold 3 and a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold; definition of open source AI (OSI); the European AI regulation enters into force. (14, 9, 25)
• September 2024: the Council of Europe's Framework Convention on AI opens for signature, the first legally binding international treaty on the subject. (25)
• Early 2025: the "DeepSeek moment" (a Chinese open frontier model); reasoning models become widespread; announcement of the Stargate project. (9, 4, 8)
• January 2025: publication of the paper "Gradual Disempowerment," which formalizes the risk of a gradual disempowerment of humanity without any abrupt takeover. (25)
• February 2025: AI Action Summit in Paris (co-chaired by France and India), marking a shift from "risk" to "action." (25)
• March 2025: OpenAI's new image generator and a viral wave of "Ghibli-style" images, reviving the debate over training without consent and respect for artists. (16)
• March 2025: Cortical Labs unveils the CL1, the first commercial biological computer combining cultured human neurons with a silicon chip. (8)
• Mid-2025: first detailed publications on the energy and water cost of an AI query (on the order of 0.3 Wh per text query). (10)
• July 2025: end of the SAG-AFTRA video game strike (nearly eleven months), with unprecedented protections against AI for performers (consent and disclosure for digital replicas). (16)
• September 2025: publication of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (MIRI), the most radical expression of the existential-risk camp. (7, 24)
• October 2025: "Statement on Superintelligence" (Future of Life Institute) calling for a conditional ban on superintelligence; a very broad coalition, more than one hundred thousand signatories within a few months. (24)
• November 2025: Starcloud places an NVIDIA H100 GPU in orbit, the first data-center-class processor in space, running a language model there. (8)
• 2025-2026: the humanoid race (Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Unitree...); NVIDIA's Vera Rubin generation; quantum advances (Willow, IBM's roadmap). (13, 8, 12)
• Early 2026: rise of self-hosted autonomous agents (OpenClaw, Hermes Agent) and the launch of Moltbook, a "social network" for AI agents. (6, 20)
• February 2026: the New Delhi AI summit (India), extending the series of international summits. (25)
• February 2026: dispute between the Pentagon and an AI lab over military-use restrictions (red lines, a "supply chain risk" designation, then an injunction from a judge). (22)
• March 2026: Covenant-72B, the largest decentralized training of a large language model (72 billion parameters), carried out on the Bittensor network, without a data center. (11)
• April 2026: the Glasswing project, a defensive cybersecurity coalition built around a frontier model capable of finding software vulnerabilities at scale. (20)
• June 2026: Alibaba releases Qwen-AgentWorld (open weights, Apache 2.0 license), a language world model that simulates the digital environments of agents (terminal, web, operating system, code) to train and test them. (5, 6)
• June 2026: "AI with us" (Lille, Hauts-de-France), a French flagship event centered on uses and citizen adoption. (25)
• June 2026: suspension, via export controls, of access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals, the first export control targeting an AI model. (20, 25)
• August 2, 2026: general application of the European AI regulation (high-risk systems, transparency). (25)
• Late 2026 (targeted): first clinical trials of an AI-designed drug (Isomorphic Labs). (14)

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