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Interactive AI Timeline · Updated July 2026

The Road to Artificial Superintelligence.

Trace the historical progression of AI from Turing's early mathematical foundations to the 2026 frontier of agentic reasoning models. Every milestone is linked directly to primary source papers and official documents.

1950Breakthrough

Alan Turing Proposes the Turing Test

Alan Turing publishes his seminal paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', introducing the 'imitation game' (now known as the Turing Test) to evaluate machine intelligence.

Key: Alan TuringSource: [53]
1956Social & Policy

The Dartmouth Workshop

A summer research project organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon at Dartmouth College, widely credited with coining the term 'Artificial Intelligence'.

Key: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Nathaniel RochesterSource: [54]
1958Breakthrough

Frank Rosenblatt Invents the Perceptron

Rosenblatt introduces the Perceptron, the earliest artificial neural network architecture designed for pattern recognition and binary classification.

Key: Frank RosenblattSource: [55]
1986Breakthrough

Popularization of Backpropagation

Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams publish in Nature, demonstrating how the backpropagation algorithm can train multi-layer neural networks to learn internal hidden representations.

Key: David E. Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton, Ronald J. WilliamsSource: [56]
1997Game AI

Deep Blue Defeats Garry Kasparov

IBM's chess-playing computer Deep Blue defeats reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in a historic six-game match under tournament conditions.

Key: Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, IBM Research TeamSource: [57]
2012Breakthrough

AlexNet Wins the ImageNet Challenge

Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoff Hinton train a deep convolutional neural network (AlexNet) using GPU acceleration, achieving a massive win on ImageNet.

Key: Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey E. HintonSource: [58]
2014Breakthrough

Ian Goodfellow Invents GANs

Goodfellow et al. introduce Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), setting up a competitive game between a generator and a discriminator model.

Key: Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Jean Pouget-AbadieSource: [59]
2015Compute & HW

ResNet: Deep Residual Learning introduced

Kaiming He and colleagues introduce Deep Residual Learning, using skip connections to train neural networks containing over 150 layers.

Key: Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian SunSource: [60]
2016Game AI

AlphaGo Defeats Grandmaster Lee Sedol

Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol 4-1 in a televised match in Seoul.

Key: David Silver, Demis Hassabis, DeepMind TeamSource: [41]
2017Breakthrough

The Transformer Architecture Introduced

Google researchers publish 'Attention Is All You Need', introducing the Transformer architecture built entirely on self-attention mechanisms.

Key: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Aidan N. Gomez, Illia PolosukhinSource: [61]
2019Game AI

AlphaStar Reaches Grandmaster in StarCraft II

DeepMind's AlphaStar agent achieves grandmaster ranking in StarCraft II, mastering imperfect information and real-time strategy.

Key: Oriol Vinyals, David Silver, DeepMind TeamSource: [42]
2020Social & Policy

OpenAI Releases GPT-3

OpenAI publishes 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners', introducing the 175-billion parameter GPT-3 model.

Key: OpenAI Research Team, Alec Radford, Ilya SutskeverSource: [62]
2022Social & Policy

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT

OpenAI introduces ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot aligned via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

Key: OpenAI Alignment Team, Sam AltmanSource: [63]
2023Social & Policy

GPT-4 and economic impact reviews

OpenAI releases GPT-4, demonstrating human-level performance on legal/medical exams. Goldman Sachs projects AI will raise global GDP by 7%.

Key: OpenAI Systems Team, Goldman Sachs ResearchSource: [49]
2024Compute & HW

Google Genie & Willow quantum chip

Google DeepMind introduces Genie (playable world models), and Quantum AI announces the Willow chip achieving quantum error correction below threshold.

Key: Google Quantum AI Team, Google DeepMind TeamSource: [45]
2024Game AI

Project Sid: 1,000 Autonomous Agents in Minecraft

Altera AI runs a simulation of 1,000 cooperative language model agents in Minecraft, showing trade networks and social structures.

Key: Altera AI Research TeamSource: [44]
2025Breakthrough

The Rise of RL & Reasoning Models

The release of reasoning models (like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI's o-series) shifts the paradigm from pre-training compute to inference-time scaling.

Key: DeepSeek Team, OpenAI o1 TeamSource: [38]
2025Social & Policy

State of AI: Enterprise adoption reaches 88%

McKinsey's annual survey confirms that generative AI adoption has surged to 88% of organizations using it in at least one business function.

Key: McKinsey & Company / QuantumBlackSource: [71]
2026Social & Policy

OpenAI Launches Flagship GPT-5.5

OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, a highly optimized agentic model family designed for multi-step task execution, tool use, and self-correction.

Key: OpenAI Developer RelationsSource: [14]
2026Social & Policy

Claude Fable 5 & coding benchmark breakthroughs

Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5, achieving an 80.3% solve rate on the SWE-bench Pro coding benchmark, and Claude Code reaches $2.5B ARR.

Key: Anthropic Press, Simon WillisonSource: [19]
2026Social & Policy

SpaceX Acquires xAI in Landmark Compute Deal

SpaceX formally acquires xAI for $20B to combine physical engineering, Starlink satellite backbones, Optimus humanoid brains, and sovereign defense networks.

Key: Elon Musk, SpaceX PRSource: [78]
2026Social & Policy

Anthropic Releases Claude Sonnet 5 & Claude Science

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 for mainstream agentic workflows, alongside Claude Science, a dedicated browser-based workbench for scientific research.

Key: Dario Amodei, Anthropic Product TeamSource: [72]
2026Social & Policy

Fable 5 Global Redeployment & Jailbreak Framework

After a temporary mid-June suspension due to government security concerns, Claude Fable 5 returns globally with a shared safety framework for scoring jailbreak severity.

Key: Glasswing Safety Group, US Government DirectivesSource: [74]
2026Social & Policy

Google Releases DiffusionGemma

Google open-sources DiffusionGemma, demonstrating parallel token drafting architectures that generate text up to 4x faster.

Key: Google DeepMind ResearchSource: [80]
2026Social & Policy

Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K2.7-Code MoE

Moonshot AI rolls out Kimi K2.7-Code, a 1-trillion parameter Mixture-of-Experts coding model engineered for long-context program synthesis.

Key: Moonshot AI Product TeamSource: [81]
2026Social & Policy

Zhipu AI Announces GLM-5.2

Zhipu AI launches GLM-5.2, bringing advanced agentic planning and code execution parameters to the GLM open weights stack.

Key: Zhipu AI Research LabSource: [82]
2026Social & Policy

OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 Series (Sol, Terra, Luna)

OpenAI introduces GPT-5.6 in a limited preview (Sol flagship, Terra balanced, Luna fast). Release is restricted to vetted partner organizations at the government's request.

Key: Sam Altman, OpenAI Dev RelationsSource: [79]
2024Game AI

Decart AI Unveils Oasis Generative Engine

Decart AI launches Oasis, the first streamed real-time generative world model, simulating Minecraft gameplay frame-by-frame directly from user input.

Key: Decart AI TeamSource: [?]
2026Compute & HW

Boston Dynamics Unveils Production Electric Atlas

Boston Dynamics releases the fully electric version of its Atlas humanoid with 56 DoF, committing initial production to Hyundai and Google DeepMind.

Key: Boston Dynamics EngineeringSource: [?]
2026Compute & HW

Figure AI Deploys Figure 03 at BMW Group Plant

Figure AI deploys its Figure 03 humanoid robots at BMW's Spartanburg plant, executing complex component sequencing under the Helix 02 AI system.

Key: Figure AI Team, BMW GroupSource: [?]
2026Social & Policy

UAE's G42 Launches Sovereign AI Greenshield

Abu Dhabi's G42 partners with Microsoft to launch Greenshield and Digital Embassies, guaranteeing localized data residency for agentic AI workloads.

Key: G42 Press Office, MicrosoftSource: [?]
2026Social & Policy

US Issues NSPM-11 on National Security AI

The White House issues National Security Presidential Memorandum-11 to accelerate the acquisition of multi-vendor commercial frontier AI models.

Key: White House National Security EnterpriseSource: [?]