1958Models
The Perceptron: A Machine That Would Think
The Perceptron promised to walk, talk, and be conscious within a decade.
Models
Models in AI History
The architectures and model families - from the Perceptron to the Transformer - that define what AI can do.
18 stories
1982Models
Hopfield Networks: Memory as Energy
John Hopfield showed that a network of neurons could function as an associative memorylike a brain that recalls the whole from a fragment.
1989Models
LeNet: The Convolutional Net That Read Your Cheques
LeCun's convolutional network read handwritten cheques for AT&T10% of all cheques cleared in the US by 1998.
1992Models
TD-Gammon: The Neural Network That Taught Itself to Play
TD-Gammon taught itself backgammon by playing 1.5 million gamesalone.
1998Models
MNIST: The Dataset That Trained a Generation
MNIST started as a post office problem: sorting zip codes by hand.
2012Models
AlexNet: The Network That Woke Up Deep Learning
In September 2012, two grad students and their professor submitted a network to an obscure vision contest and ended the hand-engineered-features era of AI in a single afternoon.
2013Models
Word2Vec: The Geometry of Language
Word2Vec proved that king − man + woman ≈ queen: geometry in meaning.
2013Models
DQN: Teaching a Network to Play Atari from Pixels
DeepMind's DQN learned to play 49 Atari games from raw pixels, and beat humans on 29 of them.
2014Models
GANs: The Art of Machine Deception
Ian Goodfellow invented GANs in a single night after an argument at a barthe generator and discriminator idea came fully formed.
2017Models
The Transformer: Architecture of the AI Age
"Attention Is All You Need" was written in months by a team that mostly left Google.
2018Models
BERT: Bidirectional Context and the Pre-training Revolution
BERT read sentences backwards and forwards simultaneously, and rewrote how the field thought about language understanding.
2022Models
Stable Diffusion: How Open Weights Changed Generative AI
Stable Diffusion was not the best text-to-image model in 2022. It was the first one anyone could run at home.
2023Models
LLaMA: How Meta Opened the Model Weights and Changed AI
Meta released LLaMA's weights and they leaked to 4chan within a week. The open-source LLM era had begun whether anyone was ready or not.
2025Models
DeepSeek R1: The $6 Million Model That Shook a $3 Trillion Industry
A Chinese AI lab released an open-source reasoning model that matched OpenAI's o1. It reportedly cost $6 million to train. NVIDIA lost $600 billion in market cap in a single day.
2026Models
Claude Opus 5: When Coding Agents Stopped Needing Supervision
Opus 5 scored 96% on the industry's standard coding benchmark. That's not a high score. That's the benchmark running out of room.
2026Models
DeepSeek V4-Flash and the Discount That Keeps Repeating
A frontier-class model, open weights, MIT license, and a price so low the cache hits cost a fraction of a cent per million tokens.
2026Models
Kimi K3: Full Weights, Eleven Days After Launch
Moonshot launched Kimi K3 as an API. Eleven days later, it gave away all 2.8 trillion parameters for free.
2026Models
GLM-5.3-Flash: A Tenth of the Price, Better Than Its Predecessor
Z.ai tested it anonymously first. Once revealed, it beat its own flagship at one-tenth the cost.