AI in 2024
34 events, oldest first. Each links to a page with details and sources.
January 2024 2
- Microsoft AI and PNNL screen 32 million candidates to find a solid electrolyte using ~70% less lithium ★★
Microsoft's Azure Quantum Elements combined AI models and HPC to narrow 32 million inorganic candidates to 18 in about 80 hours. PNNL synthesised and tested the top pick, a Li–Na–Y chloride solid electrolyte reported to use about 70% less lithium, as a working prototype battery.
- AlphaGeometry solves olympiad geometry near gold-medallist level without human demonstrations ★★★
AlphaGeometry (Nature, 17 Jan 2024) solved 25 of 30 IMO geometry problems from 2000–2022. The previous best system solved 10 and the average gold medallist 25.9. It combines a language model with a symbolic deduction engine and was trained on 100M synthetic proofs.
February 2024 3
- Gemini 1.5 Pro brings a 1-million-token context window ★★★★
Google announced Gemini 1.5 Pro, a mixture-of-experts model with a context window of up to 1 million tokens in production preview (10M tested in research), able to process hours of video or entire codebases in a single prompt.
- OpenAI previews Sora, a text-to-video 'world simulator' ★★★★
OpenAI previewed Sora, a diffusion-transformer model generating up to a minute of high-fidelity video from text, framing video generation as a path toward general-purpose simulators of the physical world.
- AI controller predicts and avoids tearing instabilities in the DIII-D fusion reactor ★★★
Princeton and PPPL researchers (Nature, Feb 2024) trained an RL controller on past DIII-D data. It forecast tearing-mode instabilities up to 300 ms ahead and adjusted operating parameters in real time to avoid them during experiments while keeping high performance.
March 2024 2
- Anthropic launches the Claude 3 family (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) ★★★★
Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku introduced vision and a 200K context window; Anthropic reported that Opus outperformed GPT-4 on most common benchmarks, making it the first model widely seen as matching or beating GPT-4.
- NVIDIA unveils the Blackwell GPU platform ★★★★
At GTC 2024, NVIDIA introduced the Blackwell architecture (B200, GB200 NVL72 rack), a dual-die GPU designed for trillion-parameter model training and inference, succeeding Hopper.
April 2024 1
- Meta releases Llama 3 (8B, 70B) ★★★
Meta released Llama 3 8B and 70B, trained on over 15 trillion tokens, which set a new bar for open-weight models and powered the Meta AI assistant across Meta's apps.
May 2024 4
- AlphaFold 3 predicts structures and interactions of all life's molecules ★★★★
AlphaFold 3 extended structure prediction from proteins to complexes with DNA, RNA, ligands and ions, using a diffusion-based architecture, with at least 50% improvement on protein–ligand interactions over prior methods.
- OpenAI launches GPT-4o, a natively multimodal 'omni' model ★★★★
GPT-4o reasoned natively across text, audio and vision in real time, responding to speech in as little as 232 ms, and brought GPT-4-level intelligence to free ChatGPT users.
- Jan Leike resigns, saying OpenAI's safety culture 'has taken a backseat to shiny products'; Superalignment team dissolved ★★★★
In mid-May 2024 both leads of OpenAI's Superalignment team left: chief scientist Ilya Sutskever announced his departure on May 14 and Jan Leike posted 'I resigned' hours later. On May 17 Leike explained in an X thread that 'safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products' and…
- AI Seoul Summit: Frontier AI Safety Commitments ★★★
At the AI Seoul Summit (21–22 May 2024), 16 AI companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft and China's Zhipu AI signed Frontier AI Safety Commitments to publish safety frameworks with risk thresholds.
June 2024 4
- Leopold Aschenbrenner publishes "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead" (AGI by 2027, trillion-dollar clusters, 'The Project') ★★★★
On June 4, 2024 former OpenAI Superalignment researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner published "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead", a ~165-page essay series. It argues that 'AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible' by counting orders of magnitude (OOMs) of compute and algorithmic gains, that AGI would…
- "A Right to Warn about Advanced AI": current and former OpenAI and DeepMind employees demand whistleblower protections ★★★
On June 4, 2024, thirteen current and former employees of frontier AI companies (mostly OpenAI, plus Google DeepMind and Anthropic alumni), six of them anonymous, published "A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence". It was endorsed by Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Stuart…
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet launches with Artifacts ★★★★
Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperformed Claude 3 Opus at twice the speed and a fifth of the price, and quickly became developers' favorite coding model; claude.ai added Artifacts, a side panel for live code and documents.
- ESM3 generates esmGFP, a new fluorescent protein estimated at '500 million years of evolution' from nature ★★★
EvolutionaryScale's ESM3, a multimodal protein language model, generated esmGFP, a bright fluorescent protein only 58% identical to the closest known fluorescent protein. The authors estimate that distance equals over 500 million years of natural evolution. Published in Science (Jan 2025).
July 2024 3
- NeuralGCM: Google's hybrid physics-ML atmosphere model matches top weather forecasts and runs decades-long climate simulations ★★★
In Nature (Kochkov et al., 22 July 2024) Google introduced NeuralGCM. It pairs a differentiable spectral dynamical core with neural-network physics parameterisations trained end-to-end. It was competitive with ECMWF for 1–15-day forecasts, reproduced four decades of observed temperatures in…
- Llama 3.1 405B: the first frontier-class open-weights model ★★★★
Meta released Llama 3.1 including a 405B-parameter model with 128K context, which Meta said was competitive with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet — the first openly downloadable model at the frontier.
- AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 reach IMO silver-medal standard ★★★★
Google DeepMind's AlphaProof (RL + Lean formal proofs) and AlphaGeometry 2 solved 4 of 6 problems at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad, scoring 28/42 — silver-medal level, one point short of gold.
August 2024 1
- EU AI Act enters into force ★★★★★
The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), the world's first comprehensive AI law, entered into force on 1 August 2024 with obligations phased in over 2025–2027 under a risk-based approach.
September 2024 3
- AlphaProteo designs high-affinity protein binders, including the first AI-designed VEGF-A binder ★★★
DeepMind's AlphaProteo generated protein binders for 7 targets with 9–88% experimental success rates (88% for BHRF1) and 3–300× better affinities than prior methods. It produced the first successful AI-designed binder for VEGF-A.
- OpenAI o1: reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning ★★★★★
OpenAI released o1-preview and o1-mini, models trained with large-scale RL to 'think' via a long private chain of thought before answering, yielding large gains in math, science and coding and introducing test-time compute scaling.
- Sam Altman publishes "The Intelligence Age": superintelligence possibly 'in a few thousand days' ★★★
On Sept 23, 2024 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published "The Intelligence Age" on a standalone site. He argues that deep learning works and keeps getting predictably better with scale, and that 'it is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)'. He calls for abundant compute…
October 2024 4
- Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton ★★★★★
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton 'for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks'.
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein design and AlphaFold ★★★★★
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded half to David Baker for computational protein design and half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind for protein structure prediction with AlphaFold.
- Dario Amodei publishes "Machines of Loving Grace": how powerful AI could compress a century of progress into a decade ★★★★
On Oct 11, 2024 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published "Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better", a ~15,000-word essay. It describes 'powerful AI' as 'a country of geniuses in a datacenter' that could arrive as early as 2026, and argues it could compress 50–100…
- Anthropic releases computer use for Claude 3.5 Sonnet ★★★★
Anthropic's upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet became the first frontier model offered with 'computer use' in public beta — operating a computer by viewing screenshots and moving the cursor, clicking and typing.
November 2024 2
- AlphaQubit: neural decoder sets accuracy record for quantum error correction on Google's Sycamore ★★★
AlphaQubit (Nature, Nov 2024), a recurrent-transformer decoder for the surface code, made 6% fewer errors than tensor-network decoding and 30% fewer than correlated matching on real Sycamore data at code distances 3 and 5. It is not yet fast enough for real-time use.
- Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ★★★★★
Anthropic introduced MCP, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources and tools; within a year it was adopted by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and most AI developer tools, becoming the de facto agent–tool protocol.
December 2024 5
- GenCast: diffusion-based ensemble forecast beats ECMWF's ENS on 97% of targets ★★★
GenCast (Nature, Dec 2024) is a diffusion model producing probabilistic 15-day ensemble forecasts. It beat ECMWF's ENS, the leading operational ensemble, on 97.2% of 1,320 targets and on 99.8% at lead times beyond 36 hours, generating a 15-day ensemble member in about 8 minutes on one TPU.
- Google launches Gemini 2.0 for the 'agentic era' ★★★★
Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash (experimental) with native image and audio output and tool use, alongside agent prototypes Project Astra, Project Mariner and Jules, framing it as a model for the agentic era.
- OpenAI announces o3, scoring 75.7–87.5% on ARC-AGI ★★★★★
On the last day of its '12 Days of OpenAI', OpenAI previewed o3, which scored 75.7% on the ARC-AGI semi-private set (87.5% with high compute) — a benchmark on which earlier LLMs scored in single digits — and 25.2% on FrontierMath.
- OpenAI o3 scores 25% on FrontierMath research-level maths benchmark, amid funding disclosure controversy ★★★
Epoch AI's FrontierMath (Nov 2024) contains unpublished research-level problems on which models scored under 2%. On 20 Dec 2024 OpenAI claimed 25.2% for o3. It then emerged that OpenAI had funded the benchmark and had access to most problems. Released o3 scored lower in independent tests.
- DeepSeek-V3: frontier-level open model trained for ~$5.6M in GPU time ★★★★★
Chinese lab DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3, a 671B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (37B active) with open weights that rivaled GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet; its final training run reportedly used 2.788M H800 GPU-hours (~$5.6M).