Foundation Models
GPT-3’s arrival in 2020 demonstrated that scaling language models produced emergent, surprising capabilities, and ChatGPT’s 2022 launch brought AI into mainstream daily life almost overnight. Foundation models reshaped industries from medicine to law while igniting urgent global debates about safety, alignment, and regulation. The question shifted from whether machines could think to what humanity should do now that they increasingly seem to.
OpenAI's GPT-3 demonstrated that scaling up language models could produce emergent abilities no one explicitly programmed, igniting the foundation model era.
DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 cracked the protein folding problem with unprecedented accuracy, stunning the scientific world overnight.
OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and it reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.