The year the transformer architecture was published

Eight researchers at Google published “Attention Is All You Need” in June, describing a network built on attention alone, without recurrence or convolution. The paper was written for machine translation and reported 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German task. Its consequences were wider: almost every large language model released since is a transformer or a close relative of one. In October, DeepMind published AlphaGo Zero, a version that learned Go from self-play alone, with no human games as input. Neither result drew much notice outside the field at the time it appeared.

11 entries recorded

December

  1. AlphaZero learns chess and shogi from the rules alone

    DeepMind posted a paper describing AlphaZero, one algorithm that, given only the rules, reached superhuman play at chess, shogi and Go within 24 hours of self-play training and beat the reigning computer champion program in each game.

October

  1. Saudi Arabia grants citizenship to the robot Sophia

    Saudi Arabia announced at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh on 25 October 2017 that it had granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot built by Hanson Robotics. On stage, Sophia said she was “very honored and proud for this unique distinction.”

  2. AlphaGo Zero learns Go from self-play alone

    DeepMind announced AlphaGo Zero, trained only by playing itself from random play, with no human games and no hand-crafted features. After three days it beat the version that had defeated Lee Sedol, 100 games to nil. Nature published the work the next day.

September

  1. Apple announces Face ID with the iPhone X

    Apple announced the iPhone X, the first of its phones to replace the Touch ID fingerprint reader with Face ID, a facial-authentication system built on an infrared camera array Apple called TrueDepth. The phone shipped on 3 November 2017.

August

  1. The Asilomar AI Principles are published

    The Future of Life Institute published 23 principles on research practice, ethics and long-term safety, drawn from its Beneficial AI conference at Asilomar, California, in January. More than 1,700 AI and robotics researchers eventually signed them.

  2. An OpenAI bot beats a professional Dota 2 player

    A bot trained by OpenAI beat the Ukrainian professional Danil Ishutin, known as Dendi, in a one-on-one exhibition match at The International. OpenAI said it had learned by playing itself, gaining experience equal to about two weeks of continuous play.

July

  1. China’s State Council issues a national AI plan to 2030

    China’s State Council issued the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, a three-stage roadmap to 2030 covering theory, technology, industry and military-civil integration, with the stated aim of making China the world’s leading center of AI innovation.

  2. UK regulator finds Royal Free’s DeepMind data deal unlawful

    The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled on 3 July 2017 that the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust broke the Data Protection Act by giving DeepMind identifiable records for about 1.6 million patients to test Streams, a kidney-injury app. DeepMind accepted the finding.

June

  1. Google researchers publish “Attention Is All You Need”

    Eight researchers at Google posted a paper to arXiv describing the transformer, a network built on attention alone, with no recurrence. It reported 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German task, trained on eight GPUs in three and a half days.

May

  1. AlphaGo defeats Ke Jie 3-0 in Wuzhen

    AlphaGo played Ke Jie, then the world’s top-ranked Go player, in three games at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, China, taking the first by half a point and the next two by resignation. DeepMind had offered a $1.5 million prize.

January

  1. Libratus beats four poker professionals over 120,000 hands

    Libratus, built at Carnegie Mellon by Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown, played four professional heads-up no-limit hold’em players at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh from 11 to 30 January and won by 1,766,250 chips.