No. 1412
day of the machine era. Year 4 is under way.
The story of artificial intelligence as it is being written: from the 2017 paper where it all began to the events of this week. In plain language, for anyone who wants to understand what is going on. Days are counted from 30 November 2022, when ChatGPT launched.
Atlas of the Machine Years
Who set the course of history, and when. The map grows a little longer every day.
- Google & DeepMind
- OpenAI
- Meta
- Anthropic
- China
- Open models
- Nvidia & chips
The book draws the streams itself: the more significant events a player had in the chronicle during those months, the wider its stream. While the chronicle is still filling up, the streams are thin; the atlas grows with the book.
Latest entries
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OpenAI adds Google's invisible marks to AI images so fakes can be spotted
In May 2026, OpenAI began embedding SynthID, invisible marks invented at Google, in images made with AI. Kakao and ElevenLabs are adopting them too, and you can now check whether an image is AI-generated right in Google Search.
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China's DeepSeek releases an open model on par with OpenAI, and Nvidia stock plunges
In January 2025, Chinese company DeepSeek released R1, an open model it said reasons as well as OpenAI's best. A week later Nvidia shares fell about 17%, a record one-day loss of value in US market history.
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GPT-4 arrives, a model that sees pictures and passes a lawyers' exam
Just three and a half months after ChatGPT, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4. The new model understands images as well as text, and on a practice US bar exam it scored around the top 10% of test takers.
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ChatGPT arrives, and anyone can now talk to artificial intelligence
On 30 November 2022, OpenAI opened its free ChatGPT chatbot to everyone. You could type a question in plain words and get an answer, as if from a person. Within two months, around 100 million people were using it.