GenAI Chronicle
2010
2011
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2023

May

6 events

Editors' summary

AI spreads, NVIDIA's stock soars

On 1 May, Geoffrey Hinton, a leading figure in artificial intelligence research, abruptly left Google. He said he wanted to be free to speak about the dangers of his own work.

On the 16th, Sam Altman testified before the US Senate and asked to be regulated. On the 30th, the heads of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic all signed a one-sentence joint statement: that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war.

At Google I/O on the 10th, meanwhile, PaLM 2 was announced and Bard opened in 180 countries.

On the 24th, NVIDIA's earnings beat market expectations by a wide margin on data centre demand, and the stock surged. By the end of the month it had reached a trillion-dollar market capitalisation.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record6 events
  1. 1
    PeopleGoogle / Geoffrey Hinton

    Geoffrey Hinton quits Google to speak freely about AI risk

    Geoffrey Hinton, a founding figure of deep learning and a VP and engineering fellow at Google, left the company after ten years. He told The New York Times that he had new fears about the technology he had helped bring about, wanted to speak openly about them, and partly regretted his life's work. Hinton said on X that he had resigned so he could discuss the dangers of AI without weighing the effect on Google. He had thought artificial general intelligence was 20 to 50 years away, he said, but now believed developers might be close to computers that could conceive of ways to improve themselves. The man Google had acquired with DNNresearch in 2013 was now leaving it to sound an alarm. A founding figure of the technology speaking publicly about its dangers drew wide coverage at the time. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024.

  2. 10
    ModelGoogle / Sundar Pichai

    PaLM 2 arrives, Bard goes to 180 countries, and search gets generative AI

    At Google I/O, Google announced PaLM 2, with better multilingual understanding, logical reasoning, and coding, supporting more than 20 programming languages including Python, JavaScript, C++, Verilog, and Prolog. Google said it was already powering 25 products including Android, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Docs. Bard switched to PaLM 2, dropped its waitlist, and opened to over 180 countries, adding Japanese and Korean alongside English with 40 languages promised — this was when Japanese support arrived. Google also announced the Search Generative Experience (SGE), putting AI-generated summaries into search results as an experiment. Three months after February's stumble, this was the event where Google committed to putting generative AI across its main products.

  3. 11
    ModelAnthropic

    Claude's context window expands to 100K tokens

    Anthropic expanded Claude's context window from 9,000 to 100,000 tokens — roughly 75,000 words — and made it available through its API. Hundreds of pages of material, or an entire book, could now fit in a single prompt, enabling use cases such as analyzing financial statements, reviewing legal documents, and prototyping against a whole codebase. In a demonstration, Claude read the full text of The Great Gatsby and identified a modified line in 22 seconds. The announcement staked out long-context handling as a differentiator, and context length became a standard axis of model comparison thereafter.

  4. 16
    PolicyOpenAI / Sam Altman / Christina Montgomery / Gary Marcus

    Sam Altman testifies before US Senate, calls for AI regulation

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified for the first time before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law at its "Oversight of A.I." hearing. Altman himself called for regulation, including licensing of AI models and a new government agency, alongside witnesses Christina Montgomery of IBM and Gary Marcus of New York University. An AI company chief asking to be regulated drew wide attention and marked a turning point in the US debate on AI regulation.

  5. 23
    BusinessAnthropic / Dario Amodei / Spark Capital / Google

    Anthropic raises $450 million Series C

    Anthropic announced a $450 million Series C led by Spark Capital, with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, and Zoom Ventures. The company said the money would grow its product teams to support enterprise deployment of Claude, advance alignment research, and ship capabilities such as the 100K-token context window. It also said it would continue refining governance structures suited to its public benefit orientation. It announced the Long-Term Benefit Trust that September.

  6. 30
    PolicyCenter for AI Safety / Sam Altman / Dario Amodei / Demis Hassabis

    One-sentence statement warns of extinction risk from AI

    The Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit research organisation, released a statement consisting of a single sentence: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." More than 350 researchers and executives signed, among them Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Coverage focused on the fact that the people leading the work were describing its risks in the strongest available terms.

↑ 2023