Appearances

1. July 2019Microsoft Invests US$1 Billion in OpenAIMicrosoft announced a US$1 billion investment in OpenAI alongside an exclusive cloud partnership. OpenAI was, at that point, a research organisation that had just released GPT-2; the deal nevertheless became the move that defined the industry structure once the generative-AI boom arrived in 2022–23. An additional US$10 billion in January 2023 and the integration of GPT-4 into Bing in February 2023 cemented Microsoft's lead in the AI competition.
2. June 2020GPT-3 AnnouncedOpenAI's 175-billion-parameter language model. A more-than-hundredfold scale-up from GPT-2 (1.5B), it demonstrated 'few-shot' competence across text generation, summarisation, translation, and code—handling many tasks from a few in-prompt examples. The result pushed the research conversation toward scaling laws for large language models and reshaped the direction of AI investment.
3. June 29, 2021GitHub Copilot — The Start of AI-Assisted CodingGitHub and OpenAI released Copilot as a technical preview—an AI pair programmer that autocompletes code inside the editor. Powered by OpenAI's Codex (GPT-3 fine-tuned on code), it could generate entire functions from a partial implementation or a docstring. It became a paid subscription in June 2022. Lawsuits over copyright licenses and the 'derivative work' status of GitHub's public code followed (Doe v. GitHub, 2022), but the product reshaped the developer experience across the industry and seeded the 2025 'AI coding IDE' competition among Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and others.
4. November 30, 2022ChatGPT LaunchedOpenAI made ChatGPT publicly available—GPT-3.5 fine-tuned for dialogue and accessible free through any browser. One million users within five days; one hundred million within two months (the fastest growth of any consumer internet service to that point). Overnight, generative AI moved from a specialist research conversation into homes, schools, and workplaces, and prompted strategic pivots at Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Microsoft.
5. January 23, 2023Microsoft Invests Another US$10 Billion in OpenAITwo months after ChatGPT's launch, Microsoft announced a multi-year, multi-stage extension of its investment in OpenAI. Reporting cited a total in the order of US$10 billion, which, with the 2019 US$1 billion, made it the largest AI-related investment in history. Azure became OpenAI's exclusive cloud, and GPT-4 was integrated across Microsoft's product line—Bing, Office, Teams, Windows, GitHub. Under the deal, Microsoft would receive a share of OpenAI's profits beyond a capped threshold; the two companies' finances became effectively inseparable.
6. February 7, 2023New Bing and Microsoft Copilot — LLMs Enter SearchMicrosoft unveiled 'New Bing'—Bing search with GPT-4-based chat integrated—and announced its plans to bring Copilot to Microsoft 365 in the same period. Only two months after the ChatGPT launch, this brought LLMs into the central battlefronts of search and productivity software at once, and triggered the industry-wide pivot to 'how do we integrate an LLM into our existing product?'. Google announced Bard the following day in response.
7. March 14, 2023Anthropic Releases Claude — A Safety-First Rival LLMAnthropic—founded in 2021 by the Amodei siblings (Dario and Daniela) and others after their departure from OpenAI—released Claude, its conversational LLM, to the public. By coincidence OpenAI announced GPT-4 the same day. Anthropic emphasises its own safety methodology (Constitutional AI), and the two-pole structure of generative AI was established. Google invested US$400 million in 2023; Amazon committed up to US$4 billion over 2023–24. Anthropic grew into the most well-capitalised counter-pole to OpenAI.
8. March 14, 2023GPT-4 — Going MultimodalOpenAI announced GPT-4. The first major LLM to accept image input, it posted top-decile scores on the US Bar exam and AP tests. Parameter counts, training data, and architectural details were withheld—marking OpenAI's shift from the 'publish-and-research' posture of GPT-3 toward a more commercially closed research organisation.
9. November 17–22, 2023The OpenAI Coup — Altman Fired, Reinstated in Five DaysOn 17 November, the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman as CEO, citing 'a lack of consistent candour in his communications with the board'. The dismissal grew out of tensions between AI-safety and acceleration factions and questions about Altman's conduct. About 700 of 770 employees signed a letter threatening to resign; Microsoft signalled it would take Altman aboard; and within five days, on 22 November, Altman was reinstated. The safety-leaning directors were removed, and Bret Taylor (chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo joined the new board. The episode is remembered as a shock to the very governance structure of the AI industry.
10. January–November 2024AI Goes to War — OpenAI Policy Reversal and the Anthropic-Palantir-AWS PactOn 10 January, OpenAI quietly removed the 'military and warfare' prohibition from its usage policy, opening the door to defense work. In November of the same year, Anthropic announced a partnership with Palantir and AWS to provide Claude to the US intelligence and defense community. The pretense that generative AI was a peaceful Silicon Valley tool fell away; AI was openly recast as critical national-security infrastructure. A US Department of Defense collaboration with OpenAI was also disclosed in the same year; the integration with the military-industrial complex passed a point of no return.
11. January 20–23, 2025The Trump AI Pivot — Biden's Order Rescinded, Stargate's $500 Billion PledgeOn 20 January, the second Trump administration took office and rescinded Biden's AI Executive Order (EO 14110) on day one, pivoting US policy to liberalisation of AI development and 'American AI dominance'. The following day, the White House announced the Stargate Project—a joint venture of OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to invest up to US$500 billion in data centres, power, and chips over four years. On 23 January, a new executive order on 'Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence' was signed, formalising AI as national strategic infrastructure. Against US-China competition, AI was now positioned as a sovereign asset.