AI in 2015
3 milestones in artificial intelligence
OpenAI Founded
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit AI research lab with $1 billion in committed funding, aiming to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Co-founded by Sam Altman (Y Combinator president), Elon Musk, and top researchers including Ilya Sutskever from Google Brain.
ResNet: Deeper Than Ever
Microsoft Research introduced ResNet with skip connections (residual connections), enabling the training of networks with 152+ layers — 8x deeper than previous networks. ResNet won ImageNet 2015 with 3.57% error, surpassing human-level performance (5.1%) for the first time.
TensorFlow Open-Sourced
Google open-sourced TensorFlow, its internal machine learning framework. This gave every researcher and developer access to the same tools Google used internally. PyTorch (Facebook, 2016) followed, creating a healthy competition that accelerated the entire field.