2023 has undeniably been a whirlwind year for the world of AI. With each passing month, we witnessed a flurry of groundbreaking announcements and the release of disruptive tools and models that have left an indelible mark on our daily lives. These advancements have revolutionized the way we work and live. Here is a list of the major AI events of 2023, where innovation and progress have reached new heights, shaping the future of technology and reshaping the way we live.

I will begin by enumerating events from 2022 and then providing a comprehensive account of the events in 2023:

2022

• 9 April: Chinchilla LLMs released by DeepMind 70B parameters

• 1 october: BLOOM LLM released 176B parameters, created by over 1000 AI researchers

• 5 November: Midjourney v4 available 

• 30 November: OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a conversational AI based on the GPT-3.5 LLM, marking a significant advance in the capabilities of conversational AI and enhancing the realism of AI-human interactions​​.

2023

• 23 January: After ChatGPT went viral, Microsoft Invests $10 Billion in OpenAI. 4 years ago, in 2019 Microsoft invested $1B. 

• 1 February: OpenAI launched ChatGPT PLus subscription for $20/month

• 2 February: 2 months after its launch, OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 100M monthly active users worldwide, making it the fastest growing consumer application in history. This rapid adoption is explained by its practical use cases, its simplicity of use, and its capabilities of generating articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry in response to prompts, thus touching every aspect of human lifes.

• 8 February: Google’s parent company, Alphabet, lost ~$100B after its new AI Bot Bard answered wrongly in its first demo (Drop of ~8%). Meanwhile, Microsoft rose by 3%. In the same week, Microsoft has announced that it will embed ChatGPT in its bing search engine.

• 3 March: Meta’s LLaMa model leaked as a downloadable torrent on 4chan. End of February Meta announced this last AI model LLaMA, and its objective to release it as an open-source package, not as chatbot, as opposed to ChatGPT. It comes in 4 sizes: LLaMA-7B, 13B, 30B, and 65B.

• 14 March: Launch of OpenAI’s most capable model GPT-4.This multimodal AI is the most expensive model on OpenAI. In the same time, Microsoft announced the arrival of its new Bing AI chatbot embedded in its Edge web browser, for public, leveraging on GPT-4.(In February the Bing AI Chatbot was available as a developer preview)

• 15 March: Midjourney v5 available

• 21 March: Google Bard released to beta users to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

• 22 March: Some AI giant names like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak (among others) called all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training in AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

• 23 March: OpenAU Introduces ChatGPT Plus Plugins

• 31 March: Hugging face (AI french-us startup based in NY) hosts a meetup “The Woodstock of AI” in San Francisco to celebrate open source AI, launched in only one week by a tweet from HuggingFace CEO, it gathered over 5000 participants, making it a real gauge that demonstrates people’s skyrocketing interest in AI.  

• 31 March: Italy bans ChatGPT

• 13 April: PRIMO, a machine learning technique used to enhance the first-ever photo of a supermassive black hole.

• 20 April: Google merged two of its departments Google Brain and DeepMind (UK based startup acquired by Google in 2014) into one new entity called Google DeepMind, which is responsible for releasing Gemini later on in the year.

• 28 April: First draft of the AI Act made by EU Lawmakers.

• 28 April: Mistral an AI french company was founded by ex researchers from Google and Meta.

• April 2023: First version of Falcon LLM, open-source model, released by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi. 40B parameters. To be used for tasks like translation, question answering and summarization

• 3 May: Midjourney v5.1 available

• 10 May: Google’s Bard AI is now available to public (France not included in the 180 countries list)

• 15 May: ChatGPT’s Plugins (over 70) are now rolled out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. 

• 23 May: Anthropic raises $450M from Google, Zoom, SalesForce and others.

• 30 May: AI researchers and CEOs sign statement warning against ‘risk of extinction’. Signed by over 350 researchers, scientists, and CEOs as  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.

• 29 June: Inflection AI raised $1.3B at $4B valuation. It was founded in 2022 by Reid Hoffman among others who was on the OpenAI board from which he resigned on March 3, 2023. 

• June: Mistral raised $113M (€105M). It was valued at $260M.

• 11 July: Anthropic, an AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs, releases Claude 2, a text-based generation LLM.

• 12 July: Elon Musk created xAI, its new AI startup, which will later on the year launch Grok, Musk’s AI bot.

• 18 Jul : Meta released LlaMA 2, its open-source model, 7B, 13B and 70B parameters.

• 20 Jul: OpenAI introduces a new feature “Custom Instructions” to feed ChatGPT with it as user’s preference to eliminate the need of repeating instructions over and over in each chat conversation.

• 22 August: Meta announced the launch of its multimodal SeamlessM4T for speech and text translations. Handling different tasks: automatic speech recognition, speech-to-text, Speech-to-speech, text-to-speech and text-to-text translation (100 input languages and output varying from 36 to 100 languages depending on the task). It’s an open source model, alongside the SeamlessAlign, the biggest open multimodal translation dataset.

• 24 August: Hugging face raised $235M from investors, including Salesforce, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, Intel. Valued at $4.5B.

• September: Falcon 180B announced and released later on.

• September: Mistral AI released its first model called Mistral 7B “Mistral-tiny”, as an open-source.

• 7 September: Anthropic launches Claude Pro. $20/month in the US, and £18/month in the UK.

• 25 September: Amazon invested $4B in Anthropic.

• 19 October: OpenAI releases DALL-E-3, an advanced AI image generation model that integrates with ChatGP, available for ChatGPT Plus

• 2 November : AI Safety Summit took place in England, with the collaboration of 28 countries (USA, China, India and the European Union). The goal is to address the AI’s evolving role in society and governance. 

• 4 November: Grok, Musk’s AI bot was announced, based on Grok-1 LLM. It’s a rival of the other bots like ChatGPT, Bard…. It was released weeks later to some early adopters.

• 5 November: OpenAI first DevDay ever. Various announcements were made that day: Custom GPTs, GPT-4-Turbo, with vision, Assistant API, TTS and much more…

• 9 November: Humane, a startup co-founded by 2 ex Apple, launches AI-powered wearable PIN, to reduce smartphone dependency. Attached magnetically to clothing, it can perform several tasks from answering and making calls, writing messages and emails, and live-translation. $699 with $24 monthly subscription.

• 17 November: Drama in OpenAI leadership: Sam Altman was dismissed from his role as CEO before he was reinstated again as CEO a few days after, with the board being reorganized.

• 17 November: KyuteAI (~Cute AI) – a french non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory was launched by billionaires: Xavier Niel (Iliad/Free), Rodolphe Saadé (CMA-CGM), and Eric Schmidt (formerly Google). Funded with 250-300M€.

• 28 November: Amazon announces Q, an AI chatbot for businesses. A preview version is available. Once the preview period ends, tt will cost $20/month

• 06 December: Google announced Gemini, its multimodal AI models. Various versions were announced (Ultra, Pro, Nano), with Gemini-pro being released in google products, with an accessible free API (for now). 

• 09 December: EU AI Act

• 11 December: Mistral raised $415M (€385M) from SalesForce, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM (among others), which valued the 22-person company at ~$2B. It became the European OpenAI rival.

• Mistral released one of its most capable models: Mixtral 8x7B “Mistral-small”. It matches or outperforms GPT3.5 on most standard benchmarks. It has 45B parameters. It’s an open-source model.

• Third model, Mistral-medium is only available via paid API.

• 21 December: Anthropic is in talks to raise additional $750M. The startup is valued at $18.4B, nearly 4.5 times the startup’s $4.1B valuation earlier this year.

• December 30: OpenAI annualized revenue tops $1.6B ($1.3 in mid-October)

• Cumulative investments of Microsoft in OpenAI is about $13B, and the startup’ valuation has hit $29B.

Summary

In 2023, the world of AI witnessed an unprecedented surge in innovation and transformation, redefining how we live and work. From groundbreaking models to remarkable applications, it was a year that left us all in awe. Now, as we step into 2024, we’re left wondering: What does the future hold for AI? What new milestones and challenges await us?

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