AI Age
Deep learning. AlphaGo. Diffusion models. ChatGPT. CRISPR. Reusable rockets. The medium becomes generative.
Part of First
8 moments in this segment.
- — CRISPR Gene Editing. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier publish the CRISPR-Cas9 paper. Programmable DNA editing for any organism. Nobel Prize 2020.
- — Reusable Orbital Rocket (Falcon 9 Landing). December 21, 2015: SpaceX's Falcon 9 first stage lands back at Cape Canaveral after delivering its payload to orbit. Per-launch cost drops by an order of magnitude.
- — AlphaGo Beats Lee Sedol. March 2016: DeepMind's AlphaGo beats 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol 4-1 in Seoul. The game thought to be a decade away from AI mastery falls in three days.
- — mRNA Vaccine (BNT162b2). December 2020: Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine becomes the first mRNA vaccine authorised for human use. Three weeks from outbreak to first dose was 11 months — the fastest vaccine development ever.
- — James Webb Space Telescope. December 25, 2021: JWST launches from French Guiana. The most powerful infrared space telescope. First-light images December 2021 show galaxies 13.5 billion light-years away.
- — Stable Diffusion (Open-Source Image Gen). August 2022: Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion under the CreativeML license — runs on consumer GPUs. The first generative-image model anyone can run locally.
- — ChatGPT. November 30, 2022: OpenAI launches ChatGPT. 100 million users in 60 days — the fastest consumer-product growth in history. Large language models become a household concept.
- — Sora — Text-to-Video. February 2024: OpenAI demos Sora, generating minute-long photoreal video from text prompts. Veo (Google, May 2024) and Runway Gen-3 (June 2024) follow within four months.
