Commercial
3 milestones in AI history
R1/XCON: Expert Systems Go Corporate
R1 (later XCON) was deployed at DEC to configure VAX computer systems. It saved DEC an estimated $40 million per year. This commercial success sparked a gold rush: by 1985, companies were spending over $1 billion per year on expert systems.
LeNet: Convolutional Neural Networks
Yann LeCun demonstrated that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) could be trained with backpropagation to recognize handwritten digits. The refined LeNet-5 (1998) achieved 99%+ accuracy on MNIST and was deployed by banks to read checks — running in ATMs for years.
Llama 2: Meta Opens the Floodgates
Meta released Llama 2, a family of widely available large language models (7B, 13B, 70B parameters) distributed as open weights under a custom license that allowed broad commercial use. While not open-source in the strict OSI sense, it gave companies and researchers access to a frontier-quality model they could run, customize, and deploy themselves.