Chronicle
Every event in the book, newest first. Turning points carry an orange tag.
2026
May
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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.
2025
January
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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.
2023
March
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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.
2022
November
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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.
2017
June
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"Attention Is All You Need": the Transformer arrives, the idea ChatGPT will grow from
In June 2017, eight researchers, mostly from Google, proposed a new way to build neural networks: the Transformer. At the time it looked like a paper about machine translation. Today nearly every chatbot, ChatGPT included, is built on the idea.
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