Sources

92 sources behind 87 events.

Data credits

• Wikipedia articles are cited as secondary sources and linked, never copied (CC BY-SA 4.0).
• Planned: Epoch AI “Notable AI Models” (CC BY 4.0) for model-release candidates; Wikidata (CC0) for date checks.

Image credits

Engraved artifact plates are redrawn from these sources with an image model, then re-inked by the site. Changes: redrawn as engravings; people, logos and labels removed.

• First Computer Bug, 1945.jpg, U.S. Naval Historical Center (NH 96566-KN). Public domain. Used for 1947-first-bug.
• PurkinjeCell.jpg, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Public domain. Used for 1943-mcculloch-pitts.
• Mark I Perceptron, Figure 2 of operator's manual.png, John C. Hay and Albert E. Murray, Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. Public domain. Used for 1958-perceptron.
• IBM Electronic Data Processing Machine - GPN-2000-001881.jpg, NASA. Public domain. Used for 1958-lisp.
• Dartmouth Hall at Dartmouth College.jpg, Kenneth C. Zirkel. CC BY 4.0. Used for 1956-dartmouth-workshop.
• IBM Deep Blue at Computer History Museum (9361685537).jpg, Anton Chiang from Cupertino, CA, USA. CC BY 2.0. Used for 1997-deep-blue.
• NVIDIA@40nm@Fermi@GF110@GeForce GTX 580@UA10B338 1041A1 N2Y540.000 GF110-375-A1 DSC06727 (28114557571).jpg, Fritzchens Fritz from Berlin. CC0. Used for 2012-alexnet.
• Stone Pieces for Baduk (Board Game) (17173187033).jpg, Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China. CC0. Used for 2016-alphago.
• Datacenter Server Racks (22370909788).jpg, Carl Lender from Sunrise, USA. CC BY 2.0. Used for 2025-stargate.
• SRI Shakey robot, 1969, Computer History Museum.jpg, The wub. CC BY-SA 4.0; the derived engraving is CC BY-SA 4.0. Used for 1966-shakey.

All other illustrations were generated for this site (see the colophon on the About page).

Bibliography

• Post on X, Andrej Karpathy primary
  “The hottest new programming language is English”
• Introducing Claude, Anthropic primary
  GPT-4, and Claude, on the same day
• Introducing computer use, Anthropic primary
  An AI uses a computer
• Introducing the Model Context Protocol, Anthropic primary
  Model Context Protocol
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code, Anthropic primary
  Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code
• OpenAI founder Sutskever sets up new AI company devoted to safe superintelligence, AP via NY1 secondary
  Safe Superintelligence Inc.
• Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning, arXiv primary
  The network that found cats
• Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space, arXiv primary
  word2vec: king − man + woman ≈ queen
• Generative Adversarial Networks, arXiv primary
  Generative adversarial networks
• Attention Is All You Need, arXiv primary
  Attention Is All You Need
• BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding, arXiv primary
  BERT
• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners, arXiv primary
  GPT-3: few-shot learners
• “Welcome to the AGI era,” OpenAI says as GPT-6 Astra debuts, Axios secondary
  GPT-6 Astra and “the AGI era”
• Meta Superintelligence Labs: What We Know So Far, Built In secondary
  Meta Superintelligence Labs
• A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics primary
  McCulloch & Pitts model the neuron as logic
• Statement on AI Risk, Center for AI Safety primary
  Statement on AI Risk
• Microsoft forms superintelligence team, CNBC secondary
  Microsoft’s superintelligence team
• ELIZA: a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine, Communications of the ACM primary
  ELIZA, the first chatbot
• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, FAccT ’21 primary
  “Stochastic parrots”
• Statement on Superintelligence, FLI primary
  Statement on Superintelligence
• Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, Future of Life Institute primary
  The pause letter
• The Bletchley Declaration, GOV.UK primary
  Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit
• Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers, IBM Journal of Research and Development primary
  Samuel’s checkers player learns
• A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy / Stanford primary
  “Artificial intelligence” is coined
• Personal Superintelligence, Meta primary
  “Personal Superintelligence”
• Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind primary
  Turing asks: can machines think?
• Learning representations by back-propagating errors, Nature primary
  Backpropagation, popularised
• Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition, Neural Computation primary
  A neural network reads zip codes
• Long Short-Term Memory, Neural Computation primary
  Long short-term memory
• A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets, Neural Computation primary
  Deep belief nets revive deep learning
• The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024, NobelPrize.org primary
  Nobel prizes for AI
• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, NobelPrize.org primary
  Nobel prizes for AI
• Introducing OpenAI, OpenAI primary
  OpenAI is founded
• Better language models and their implications, OpenAI primary
  GPT-2 and staged release
• DALL·E: Creating images from text, OpenAI primary
  DALL·E and CLIP
• Introducing ChatGPT, OpenAI primary
  ChatGPT launches
• GPT-4, OpenAI primary
  GPT-4, and Claude, on the same day
• Introducing OpenAI o1-preview, OpenAI primary
  OpenAI o1: models that reason
• Introducing Operator, OpenAI primary
  Operator browses for you
• Trump renamed AI ‘super intelligence’, Poynter / PolitiFact secondary
  “Superintelligence in the true sense of the word”; “AI” becomes “Super Intelligence”
• The perceptron: A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain, Psychological Review primary
  The Perceptron makes headlines
• The Gentle Singularity, Sam Altman primary
  “The Gentle Singularity”
• Safe Superintelligence Inc., SSI primary
  Safe Superintelligence Inc.
• First Computer Bug, 1947 (photograph of the logbook page, NH 96566-KN), U.S. Naval Historical Center via Wikimedia Commons primary
  The first actual bug
• Software bug, Wikipedia secondary
  The first actual bug
• Claude Shannon, Wikipedia secondary
  Shannon’s maze-solving mouse
• Turing test, Wikipedia secondary
  Turing asks: can machines think?
• Dartmouth workshop, Wikipedia secondary
  “Artificial intelligence” is coined; The Dartmouth summer workshop
• Logic Theorist, Wikipedia secondary
  Logic Theorist proves theorems
• Lisp (programming language), Wikipedia secondary
  McCarthy designs LISP
• Perceptron, Wikipedia secondary
  The Perceptron makes headlines
• I. J. Good, Wikipedia secondary
  “The last invention that man need ever make”
• Technological singularity, Wikipedia secondary
  “The last invention that man need ever make”
• ELIZA, Wikipedia secondary
  ELIZA, the first chatbot
• Shakey the robot, Wikipedia secondary
  Shakey the robot
• Perceptrons (book), Wikipedia secondary
  Minsky & Papert publish Perceptrons
• History of artificial intelligence, Wikipedia secondary
  “In from three to eight years…”
• Mycin, Wikipedia secondary
  MYCIN diagnoses infections
• Lighthill report, Wikipedia secondary
  The Lighthill Report
• AI winter, Wikipedia secondary
  The Lighthill Report; The LISP machine market collapses
• Computer Power and Human Reason, Wikipedia secondary
  Weizenbaum warns against delegating judgement
• Hans Moravec (Stanford Cart), Wikipedia secondary
  The Stanford Cart crosses a room
• Xcon, Wikipedia secondary
  XCON goes to work at DEC
• Fifth Generation Computer Systems, Wikipedia secondary
  Japan’s Fifth Generation project
• Cyc, Wikipedia secondary
  Cyc begins encoding common sense
• Lisp machine, Wikipedia secondary
  The LISP machine market collapses
• Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov, Wikipedia secondary
  Deep Blue defeats Kasparov
• ImageNet, Wikipedia secondary
  ImageNet
• IBM Watson, Wikipedia secondary
  Watson wins Jeopardy!
• Siri, Wikipedia secondary
  Siri arrives on the iPhone 4S
• AlexNet, Wikipedia secondary
  AlexNet wins ImageNet
• Google DeepMind, Wikipedia secondary
  Google acquires DeepMind
• AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, Wikipedia secondary
  AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
• Tay (chatbot), Wikipedia secondary
  Tay is taken offline
• AlphaFold, Wikipedia secondary
  AlphaFold 2 at CASP14
• Anthropic, Wikipedia secondary
  Anthropic is founded
• LaMDA, Wikipedia secondary
  An engineer says LaMDA is sentient
• Stable Diffusion, Wikipedia secondary
  Stable Diffusion released openly
• Microsoft Copilot, Wikipedia secondary
  Bing’s “Sydney” misbehaves
• Geoffrey Hinton, Wikipedia secondary
  Hinton leaves Google to speak freely
• Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI, Wikipedia secondary
  OpenAI’s board fires, then rehires, Sam Altman
• Gemini (language model), Wikipedia secondary
  Google Gemini 1.0
• Sora (text-to-video model), Wikipedia secondary
  Sora previews text-to-video
• AI Overviews, Wikipedia secondary
  Glue on pizza
• Artificial Intelligence Act, Wikipedia secondary
  The EU AI Act enters into force
• DeepSeek, Wikipedia secondary
  DeepSeek-R1
• 2025 in artificial intelligence, Wikipedia secondary
  DeepSeek-R1; Gold-medal level at the IMO; California SB 53
• Stargate LLC, Wikipedia secondary
  The Stargate Project
• Vibe coding, Wikipedia secondary
  “Vibe coding”
• GPT-5, Wikipedia secondary
  GPT-5
• Claude Mythos, Wikipedia secondary
  Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing; Access to frontier models restricted, then restored
• 2026 in artificial intelligence, Wikipedia secondary
  Access to frontier models restricted, then restored; Meta Muse; OpenAI Dots