The canon

moment · 15

Something that happened and changed what people expected next.

• The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial IntelligenceProposed by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin L. Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM Corporation) and Claude E. Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories); attended by roughly twenty people, of whom three stayed the summer · 1956
• "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey"Sir James Lighthill · 1973
• The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA MoleculesOrganized by Paul Berg (chair) with David Baltimore, Sydney Brenner, Richard Roblin and Maxine Singer, under the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Recombinant DNA Molecules; attended by roughly 140 scientists, 16 journalists and 4 lawyers · 1975
• The collapse of the Lisp machine marketNo single actor — the Lisp machine vendors (Symbolics, Lisp Machines Inc., Texas Instruments, Xerox) and the expert-system tool companies (Teknowledge, IntelliCorp, Inference, Carnegie Group) · 1987
• The Office Assistant ships in Microsoft Office 97Microsoft — Office division, on Microsoft Research's Lumière project, character by Kevan J. Atteberry · 1996
• Deep Blue defeats Garry KasparovIBM Research — Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, A. Joseph Hoane Jr., Jerry Brody and C.J. Tan, with grandmaster Joel Benjamin · 1997
• The DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA, under director Tony Tether — won by the Stanford Racing Team, led by Sebastian Thrun · 2005
• Siri ships built into the iPhone 4SApple, on Siri, Inc. (Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, Tom Gruber), out of SRI International's CALO project · 2011
• Watson defeats Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy!IBM Research — David Ferrucci and the DeepQA team · 2011
• SuperVision wins the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition ChallengeAlex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey E. Hinton, University of Toronto — entered under the team name SuperVision · 2012
• AlphaGo's move 37, game two against Lee SedolGoogle DeepMind — David Silver, Aja Huang, Demis Hassabis and the AlphaGo team · 2016
• AlphaFold2 at CASP14DeepMind — John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov and the AlphaFold team, with Demis Hassabis · 2020
• The launch of ChatGPTOpenAI (the launch announcement is unsigned) · 2022
• The Bletchley Declaration and the AI Safety SummitSigned by 28 countries and the European Union attending the AI Safety Summit; convened and chaired by the United Kingdom government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, at Bletchley Park, 1–2 November 2023 · 2023
• The LLaMA leak and the Llama 2 releaseMeta AI — Hugo Touvron, Guillaume Lample and the LLaMA team; the leak's uploader is anonymous · 2023

idea · 12

A framing later work is built out of rather than argued about. Cited when the thing being watched descends from it and the descent explains its shape.

• The Three Laws of RoboticsIsaac Asimov, with John W. Campbell Jr. · 1942
• Programming a Computer for Playing ChessClaude Shannon · 1950
• The Logic Theory MachineAllen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and J. C. Shaw, at the RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology · 1956
• "The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain"Frank Rosenblatt, at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory · 1958
• A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with GraphsEdsger W. Dijkstra · 1959
• Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of CheckersA. L. Samuel, at the IBM Corporation · 1959
• ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And MachineJoseph Weizenbaum · 1966
• "Computer-Based Medical Consultations: MYCIN"Edward H. Shortliffe, with Bruce G. Buchanan and Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University · 1976
• Attention Is All You NeedAshish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser and Illia Polosukhin — Google Brain, Google Research and the University of Toronto · 2017
• Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human PreferencesPaul F. Christiano, Jan Leike, Tom B. Brown, Miljan Martic, Shane Legg and Dario Amodei — OpenAI and DeepMind, jointly · 2017
• Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts LayerNoam Shazeer, Azalia Mirhoseini, Krzysztof Maziarz, Andy Davis, Quoc V. Le, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Jeff Dean, Google Brain — extending Jacobs, Jordan, Nowlan and Hinton (1991) · 2017
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language ModelsJared Kaplan (Johns Hopkins and OpenAI), Sam McCandlish, Tom Henighan, Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Chess, Rewon Child, Scott Gray, Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu and Dario Amodei — OpenAI · 2020

fiction · 12

A story the culture argues through. Carried graded — what it got right and what it got wrong, against dates.

• "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"Mary Shelley · 1818
• "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)"Karel Čapek · 1920
• AutofacPhilip K. Dick · 1955
• Forbidden PlanetFred M. Wilcox, Cyril Hume, Irving Block and Allen Adler · 1956
• "2001: A Space Odyssey"Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke · 1968
• NeuromancerWilliam Gibson · 1984
• The TerminatorJames Cameron, with Gale Anne Hurd · 1984
• Short CircuitJohn Badham, S. S. Wilson and Brent Maddock · 1986
• Consider Phlebas and the Culture novelsIain M. Banks · 1987
• The Difference EngineWilliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling · 1990
• HerSpike Jonze · 2013
• Ex MachinaAlex Garland · 2014

limit · 3

A result about what cannot be done, carried together with what it is repeatedly made to say instead.

• On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems IKurt Gödel · 1931
• On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the EntscheidungsproblemAlan Turing · 1936
• "Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry"Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert · 1969

interpretation · 11

A reading of events that a reading may need to name.

• Notes by the Translator, appended to Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles BabbageAda Lovelace · 1843
• Computing Machinery and IntelligenceAlan Turing · 1950
• Some Moral and Technical Consequences of AutomationNorbert Wiener · 1960
• Goodhart's lawCharles A. E. Goodhart · 1975
• "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation"Joseph Weizenbaum · 1976
• "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979
• Moravec's paradoxHans Moravec · 1988
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of DataAlon Halevy, Peter Norvig and Fernando Pereira — Google · 2009
• "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"Nick Bostrom · 2014
• Concrete Problems in AI SafetyDario Amodei and Chris Olah (equal first authors, Google Brain), Jacob Steinhardt (Stanford), Paul Christiano (UC Berkeley), John Schulman (OpenAI) and Dan Mané (Google Brain) · 2016
• The Bitter LessonRichard S. Sutton · 2019

prediction · 7

A dated claim, carried graded: the claim in its own words, when it was made, when it came due, and what actually happened. Where a predictor graded themselves, their grade and an independent one, saying they differ. The point of the kind is a base rate for how wrong AI forecasting runs.

• "NEW NAVY DEVICE LEARNS BY DOING; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser"United Press International, datelined Washington, 7 July 1958; the forecast in the lede is attributed in the article to the Navy, not to Frank Rosenblatt · 1958
• The Shape of Automation for Men and ManagementHerbert A. Simon · 1965 — the book; the sentence is from his 1960 Ford Lectures
• "Meet Shaky, the first electronic person"Brad Darrach, writing in Life; the forecast is attributed in the article to Marvin Minsky, who later denied making it · 1970
• "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology"Ray Kurzweil · 2005
• "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?"Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne · 2013
• Tesla Autonomy Investor DayElon Musk · 2019
• Machines of Loving GraceDario Amodei · 2024