Artificial Intelligence — Timeline

1969

• 1969 — [Paper] Strassen publishes efficient matrix multiplication algorithm — the benchmark AlphaEvolve would beat 57 years later. (Context: Evolutionary Algorithm Discovery)

2021–2022

• Dec 2021 — [Technical Report] Elhage et al. publish "A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits" — establishing rigorous methods for reverse-engineering transformers, identifying induction heads and skip-trigrams. (Anthropic Circuit Tracing)
• 2022 — [Technical Report] Olsson et al. discover induction heads as the mechanistic basis for in-context learning, demonstrating phase transitions during training. (Anthropic Circuit Tracing)
• 2022 — [Technical Report] Elhage et al. publish "Toy Models of Superposition" — demonstrating polysemanticity and why interpretability is fundamentally hard. (Anthropic Circuit Tracing)

2019–2023

• 2019–2025 — [Paper] Period of rapid benchmark proliferation — ~60 benchmarks developed across 8 evaluation domains for LLM agents. (From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous Agents)
• 2023–2025 — [Paper] Agent frameworks developed and iterated, integrating LLMs with modular tools. (From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous Agents)

2023

• 2023 — [Technical Report] Bricken et al. publish "Towards Monosemanticity" — applying sparse autoencoders to extract interpretable features from transformer activations. (Anthropic Circuit Tracing)

2024

• 2024 — [News] Individual feature identification achieved in mechanistic interpretability — researchers can now identify specific concepts learned by AI models. (Mechanistic Interpretability)

2025

February

• Feb 17 — [Paper] Xu et al. publish "A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents" — Zettelkasten-inspired memory with dynamic note construction and linking. Later accepted at NeurIPS 2025. (A-MEM)

March

• Mar 27 — [Technical Report] Ameisen et al. publish "Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs" — attribution graphs tracing step-by-step computational paths in language models, tools open-sourced. (Anthropic Circuit Tracing)

January

May

• May 14 — [Technical Report] Google DeepMind unveils AlphaEvolve — evolutionary coding agent pairing Gemini with automated evaluators. Deployed inside Google infrastructure. (AlphaEvolve)

June

September

October

November

Mid-2025

• 2025 — [Technical Report] AlphaEvolve achieves production impact: 0.7% global compute recovery, 23% kernel speedup, 32.5% FlashAttention improvement. (AlphaEvolve)
• 2025 — [Technical Report] Templeton et al. scale sparse autoencoders to Claude 3 Sonnet — millions of interpretable features, Golden Gate Bridge feature discovered. (Anthropic Circuit Tracing)
• 2025–2026 — [News] Mechanistic interpretability advances from individual feature identification to tracing complete reasoning paths — prompt to response. (Mechanistic Interpretability)

December

• Dec 18, 2025 — [Technical Report] UK AI Security Institute publishes its first Frontier AI Trends Report — longitudinal capability assessment of 30+ models (2022–2025): cyber-task time horizons doubling ~8mo (accelerating to ~4.7mo), RepliBench self-replication <5%→>60%, frontier models surpassing the biology-PhD baseline, and universal jailbreaks present in every tested system. (AISI Frontier AI Trends Report)

2026

January

• Jan 12 — [News] MIT Technology Review names mechanistic interpretability one of "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026." (Mechanistic Interpretability)
• Jan 12 — [Paper] Cheng et al. (DeepSeek/PKU) publish "Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup" — introduces Engram (O(1) lookup) as a sparsity axis orthogonal to MoE, with a U-shaped scaling law; scaled to 27B params. (Engram / Conditional Memory)
• Jan 18 — [Paper] Wei et al. publish "Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models" — three-layer framework (foundational, self-evolving, multi-agent) organizing the field. (Agentic Reasoning for LLMs)

February

• Feb 7 — [Paper] Kanagala publishes agentic AI security and red-teaming framework — threat taxonomy covering permission escalation, hallucination-driven actions, orchestration flaws, memory manipulation, supply chain attacks. (Agentic AI Security)
• Feb 9 — [Analysis] Zylos Research documents 6 alignment failure modes (reward hacking, sycophancy, annotator drift, alignment mirages, rare-event blindness, optimization overhang) and formulates the Alignment Trilemma. (AI Safety 2026)
• Feb 11 — [Paper] Jeddi et al. publish "LoopFormer: Elastic-Depth Looped Transformers for Latent Reasoning via Shortcut Modulation" (ICLR 2026) — budget-conditioned in-weights deliberation with elastic loop depth; latent reasoning without a token trace. (LoopFormer)

March

• Mar 6 — [Paper] Ferrag et al. publish comprehensive review consolidating ~60 benchmarks into unified taxonomy with agent collaboration protocols (ACP, MCP, A2A). (From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous Agents)
• Mar 8 — [Paper] Du publishes agent memory survey — formalizes write-manage-read loop, identifies 5 mechanism families, three-dimensional taxonomy spanning temporal scope, representational substrate, and control policy. (Agent Memory Survey)
• Mar 30 — [Paper] Du publishes "Tiered Super-Moore's Law" — first systematic empirical analysis of LLM token pricing (3,237 models via Epoch AI + 318 via OpenRouter + 62 milestones, 2020–2026). Documents ~600× price decline; economy-tier half-life 1.10yr / mid-tier 1.55yr vs. the 2-year Moore benchmark; ~31.5× reasoning premium; May-2024 structural break (F = 5.74, p = 0.005); cost decline attributed ~103.7% to software/architecture and ~−0.9% to GPU hardware. (Tiered Super-Moore)

April

• Apr 1 — [Paper] Hu et al. publish "Agentic Tool Use in LLMs" — unified evolutionary framework across three paradigms (prompting, SFT, RL). (Agentic Tool Use in LLMs)
• Apr 2026 — [Technical Report] AlphaEvolve upgraded to Gemini 2.5 Pro for semantic evolution — now rewrites logic/control flows, not just hyperparameters. (AlphaEvolve)
• Apr 2026 — [Technical Report] AlphaEvolve Service API available via Google Cloud Early Access; OpenEvolve open-source released. (AlphaEvolve)
• Apr 2026 — [News] 40 researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Anthropic call for more investigation into reasoning models' chain-of-thought processes. (Mechanistic Interpretability)
• Apr 7 — [Preprint] ALTO (Rice University) — runs a whole LoRA fine-tuning search on shared GPUs at once: kills losing runs early, packs adapters together, gives each GPU its own adapters. Up to 13.8× faster end-to-end than LoRAFusion on a 64-adapter search (Llama-3.1-70B, 4×H100), matching expert-tuned adapter quality; the multi-GPU gain is put on idle GPUs under pipeline parallelism at small batch sizes. First source on the specialization shelf. (ALTO)
• Apr 8 — [Technical Report] Meta Muse Spark — natively multimodal (text/image/voice in single transformer) with Contemplating mode that orchestrates parallel sub-agents for deeper reasoning without latency. (Muse Spark)
• Apr 15 — [Technical Report] Google Gemini 3 released — claimed best-in-world multimodal understanding and most powerful agentic model. Improved tool-use, planning, native rich output. (Gemini 3)
• Apr 16 — [Technical Report] Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 released — coding-precision + safety leadership ("Project Glasswing"); leads the hardest agentic-coding splits (SWE-bench Pro ~64%). Opens the ~8-day compressed frontier window. (DeepSeek V4 — wave context)
• Apr 23 — [Technical Report] OpenAI GPT-5.5 ("Spud") released — agentic versatility / knowledge work. (DeepSeek V4 — wave context)
• Apr 23 — [Preprint] arXiv 2604.15726: "LLM Reasoning Is Latent, Not the Chain of Thought". Argues CoT is post-hoc rationalization, not actual computation. Implications for interpretability and CoT-based safety auditing. (Latent reasoning)
• Apr 24 — [News] DeepSeek V4 released — open-weight (MIT) MoE family (V4-Pro 1.6T/49B-active, V4-Flash 284B/13B-active, 1M context); near-frontier capability (SWE-bench Verified ~80.6%, GPQA ~90–92%) at ~1/6th the cost of Opus 4.7 / GPT-5.5. Closes the compressed frontier window. (DeepSeek V4)

May

• May 6 — [Preprint] OSAQ published — training-free, closed-form post-training weight quantization exploiting a stable low-rank null space in the Hessian to absorb outliers with zero inference overhead. Claims >40% lower perplexity than vanilla GPTQ at 2-bit when integrated with it. (OSAQ)
• May 7 — [Paper] "Stop Comparing LLM Agents Without Disclosing the Harness" (Zhang et al.) published — formalizes the Binding Constraint Thesis and measures harness-induced variance at 7.80× model-induced variance (18.48 vs 2.37 pp², 6/9 ranking reversals) in a controlled 3×3 SWE-bench Verified factorial; proposes the ETCSOVG Harness Card disclosure standard. The "edge is the harness, not the model" thesis, measured. (Stop Comparing)
• May 17 — [Preprint] VeriCache published (Yao et al.) — turns lossy KV-cache compression lossless by drafting from the compressed KV (GPU HBM) and verifying against the full KV (CPU/remote) in parallel. Up to ~4.3× throughput, output identical to full-KV (KL < 0.01 nats), ~25–40 accepted tokens/round; composes with EAGLE/MTP to 4.35×. Opens the KV-cache lane in this KB. (VeriCache)
• May 27 — [Paper] Harness-Bench published (Yao et al.) — diagnostic benchmark (106 sandboxed tasks, 5,194 execution trajectories) isolating configuration-level harness effects across model backends; names execution-alignment decoupling as the dominant failure class and argues performance must be attributed to model-harness configurations, not models. (Harness-Bench)

June

• Jun 9 — [Technical Report] Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 launch — 1M-token context, 128k max output, always-on adaptive thinking, and a new tokenizer emitting ~30% more tokens for the same text. Fable 5 runs safety classifiers that can return stop_reason: "refusal" with no billing on zero-output refusals. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jun 16 — [Paper] "How Inference Compute Shapes Frontier LLM Evaluation" (McFadyen et al.) published — across up to 12 frontier models × 7 benchmarks (SWE, math, medicine, cyber) under controlled inference-scaling interventions, fixed single-budget scores increasingly understate newer models, which have a higher ceiling that only opens at generous budgets. Recommends reporting capability as a function of inference-time compute. Makes inference budget a first-class evaluation axis. (How Inference Compute Shapes Evaluation)
• Jun 25 — [Technical Report] Anthropic deprecates fast mode for Claude Opus 4.7, removal scheduled 2026-07-24. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jun 26 — [Technical Report] Anthropic consolidates rate limits — Sonnet and Haiku limits now match Opus at every tier; usage tiers collapsed to three (Start, Build, Scale). (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jun 26 — [News] OpenAI opens a limited preview of GPT-5.6, ahead of a government review period. (GPT-5.6)
• Jun 30 — [Technical Report] Claude Sonnet 5 launched — $2/$10 per Mtok, launched as introductory through 2026-08-31 with $3/$15 to follow. The step-up was cancelled on 2026-08-10 and $2/$10 became the standard price (see Aug 10 below). 1M-token context, 128k max output. Adaptive thinking on by default with manual extended-thinking budgets removed (400 on attempt); non-default sampling params now 400; new tokenizer bills ~30% more tokens for identical text. (Anthropic Release Notes)

July

• Jul 1 — [Technical Report] Anthropic restores access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 following a prior suspension. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jul 2 — [Technical Report] Anthropic ships the agent-memory-2026-07-22 beta header, replacing managed-agents-2026-04-01 on memory-store endpoints — server-defined stable ordering, depth restricted to 0/1/omitted, segment-exact path_prefix required to end in /, prior page cursors invalidated. Agent memory becomes versioned platform surface. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jul 2 — [Preprint] Spec-AUF published — truncates block-drafter cross-entropy support at the drafter's first predicted failure, concentrating supervision on the accepted prefix. τ 2.40→2.61 on Qwen3-8B (DFlash, mean of six benchmarks); transfers to Domino (2.56→2.68). No inference-pipeline change. (Spec-AUF)
• Jul 5 — [Preprint] "Quantize the Target, Quantize the Drafter" published — quantization-aware distillation of the target plus a two-stage-trained block-diffusion drafter on a single NVIDIA A10G. 6.978× average speedup meeting required quality thresholds; 3rd overall, Efficient Qwen Competition (ICML 2026 Workshop on AdaptFM). Direct evidence quantization and speculative decoding compound (bounded — see the flagged arXiv:2505.22179 conflict). (Quantize the Target)
• Jul 5 — [Preprint] "Measuring Harness-Induced Belief Divergence in Multi-Step LLM Agents" (Yi & Song) published — the harness changes an agent's multi-step beliefs (progress, risk, recoverability, next action, …) even at matched terminal success; introduces a belief-rollout diagnostic (arrival + growth decomposition) and BIWM. Outcome parity is not harness equivalence. Freshest of the July harness cluster. (Belief Divergence)
• Jul 6 — [Preprint] DSpark published (DeepSeek author roster incl. Wenfeng Liang, Damai Dai) — semi-autoregressive drafting plus confidence-scheduled verification. 60–85% faster per-user generation at matched throughput vs. the MTP-1 production baseline, measured under live user traffic in the DeepSeek-V4 serving system; "shifts the Pareto frontier of our serving system." (DSpark)
• Jul 8 — [Technical Report] Anthropic adds API key expiration — preset/custom/"Never" durations, pre-expiry email reminders, expires_at on Admin API key listings. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jul 9 — [News] OpenAI launches GPT-5.6 as three tiers — Sol $5/$30, Terra $2.50/$15, Luna $1/$6 per Mtok, with a 90% cached-read discount and 1.25× cache-write rate. Headline claim: 54% more token-efficient on agentic coding; Sol reportedly matches Anthropic's "Mythos Preview" on ExploitBench at ~one-third the output tokens. Vendor claim, unreproduced. (GPT-5.6)
• Jul 10 — [Technical Report] Anthropic's Dreams managed-agent research preview expands to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Sonnet 5. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jul 14 — [Paper] Wang et al. publish "Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents" — automatic harness evolution does not consistently outperform simple test-time scaling under matched feedback/inference budget, and generalizes poorly to held-out tasks. Terminal-Bench 2.1, GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6. Establishes matched-budget + held-out evaluation as the methodological floor for agentic claims. (Rethinking Harness Evolution)
• Jul 14 — [Technical Report] Anthropic ships Admin API user management (beta) to all Claude Enterprise orgs — member lookup, role changes, removal, invites, groups, custom roles. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jul 14 — [Preprint] EcoSpec (Tsinghua / BIT / JD's AI infra team) — names expert scattering: in a mixture of experts, checking several guessed tokens at once pulls in extra experts from memory, eating speculative decoding's gain. Choosing guesses that reuse loaded experts cut memory reads per step 99.3 → 88.1 GB on Qwen3-235B and lifted average speed 1.22× → 1.36× over plain decoding (vs EAGLE-3); best case 1.62×; gain shrinks with batch size. (EcoSpec)
• Jul 15 — [Technical Report] Anthropic Claude Platform release notes current through this date — the first-party changelog ingested as this KB's highest-authority July source. (Anthropic Release Notes)
• Jul 16 — [Analysis] Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3 — ~2.8T-parameter MoE ("LatentMoE", 896 experts / 16 active per token; the "~1.8% activation" first recorded here was the expert share — the primary report of Jul 27 gives 104B of 2.8T parameters, ~3.7%), 1M context, native vision; described as the largest open-weight model to date. API live at $3/$15 per Mtok — up from K2.6's $0.95/$4, the most expensive Chinese-lab model to date. Tops Arena.ai's Frontend Code leaderboard ahead of Claude Fable 5 while Moonshot's own eval places it behind Fable 5 overall. Open weights promised 2026-07-27. (Kimi K3)
• Jul 27 — [Technical Report] Kimi K3 technical report (Moonshot AI, arXiv:2607.24653) — primary source: 2.8T parameters with 104B activated (~3.7%), Stable LatentMoE routing 16 of 896 experts, Kimi Delta Attention + Attention Residuals, ~2.5× overall scaling efficiency over Kimi K2 (self-comparison, undefined metric); full weights released; authors say it trails Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol overall. (Kimi K3 report)

August

• Aug 10 — [Technical Report] Anthropic cancels the Claude Sonnet 5 price step-up — the $2/$10 per Mtok rate, announced at launch as introductory through 2026-08-31 with $3/$15 to follow, becomes the standard price. The scheduled increase does not occur. Prior-gen Sonnet 4.6 remains $3/$15, so the permanent rate sits a third below the incumbent it replaced. Verified 2026-08-13 against the pricing page and the 2026-08-10 release-notes entry. Note the tokenizer offset: Sonnet 5 bills ~30% more tokens for identical text, so per unit of text the cut against Sonnet 4.6 is ~13%, not 33%.
• Aug 12 — [Technical Report] xAI releases Grok 4.6 — API list price $2.00 / $6.00 per Mtok, with a "fast variant which is twice the price"; xAI's own announcement states no change against Grok 4.5. That puts xAI on the same input rung as Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.6 Terra ($2.00) while pricing output at $6.00 — 40% below Sonnet 5's $10 and half GPT-5.6 Terra's $12. Self-reported Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 61, GDPVal-AA v2 1753, Terminal-Bench v3.0 26%. Verified 2026-08-18 against xAI's own announcement. Recorded into the Token Price Index the same day — the first xAI row it has ever carried, closing a provider-shaped hole in the rung evidence.
• Aug 13 — [Technical Report] DeepSeek V4-Pro reaches general availability — the DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 checkpoint ships to app, web and API, taking the 1.6T-total / 49B-active MoE flagship out of preview. Open-weight (MIT) and 1M-context per the V4 family recorded at Apr 24 above; the licence is carried forward from that entry, not re-verified primary today. Verified 2026-08-18 against DeepSeek's own changelog: "The GA release of DeepSeek-V4-Pro has been rolled out on the APP, Web, and API." Shipped alongside the deepseek-harness agent runtime, recorded on the harnesses rung rather than here.
• Aug 13 — [Technical Report] Google ships Gemini 3.7 Flash GA with a published expiry date on its price — introductory $0.75 / $3.75 per Mtok (cached input $0.075), stated on Google's own pricing page as "$0.75 through December 31, 2026. $1.50 starting January 1, 2027." and "$3.75 through December 31, 2026. $7.50 starting January 1, 2027." Every element doubles on 1 Jan 2027, cache storage included ($0.50 → $1.00 per Mtok-hour). Google applied the identical dated rate to the incumbent Gemini 3.6 Flash, which the Token Price Index recorded at a flat $1.50/$7.50 on 2026-08-03 — a 50% cut to the incumbent and one shared expiry across the whole live Flash generation. Prior-generation Gemini 3.5 Flash is untouched at a flat $1.50/$9.00, so the promotion is generation-scoped, not line-wide. Verified 2026-08-18 against the Gemini API pricing page. (The date Google cut 3.6 Flash is not established — the Index's prior observation is 2026-08-03 and the next is today, so the change is bounded to that window, not dated.)
• Aug 14 — [Technical Report] Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-27B — a 27B dense native vision-language model (text, image and video in, text out) under Apache 2.0, 262,144-token native context extensible to ~1M via YaRN, weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (measured 2026-08-17), ranked #1 of 135 among open-weight models of comparable size. Verified 2026-08-18 against the model card and Artificial Analysis. No API list price is recorded: the model is weights-only here, so it does not enter the Token Price Index until a hosted rate is verified against a primary source.
• Aug 16 — [Technical Report] DeepSeek's price rise takes effect — the first outright increase by the lab whose public identity in this KB is cost disruption. Warned on 6 Aug with no rates attached; effective 16:00 UTC on 2026-08-16 per DeepSeek's own changelog: "we will adopt peak/off-peak pricing, with off-peak prices set at half of the peak-hour prices." Flat pricing is replaced by a two-tier structure (peak = 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC; all other hours off-peak). V4-Pro output moves from a flat $0.87 to $1.98 off-peak / $3.96 peak (+128% / +355%); V4-Pro cache-miss input from $0.435 to $0.66 / $1.32 (+52% / +203%); V4-Pro cached input from $0.003625 to $0.022 / $0.044 — a 6.1× to 12.1× rise and by far the largest single move, which falls hardest on exactly the cache-heavy agentic workloads the harness layer generates. V4-Flash output moves from $0.28 to $0.66 / $1.32 (+136% / +371%). Verified 2026-08-18 against the pricing page and changelog; prior rates from the Token Price Index rows observed 2026-08-03. The peak window is unchanged from what the Index recorded on 2026-08-03 (09:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 Beijing = 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC); what the Index did not anticipate is that the base level would rise underneath it.