Timeline of computing 2020–present

History of computing
Hardware
Hardware before 1960 Hardware 1960s to present
Software
Software Software configuration management Unix Free software and open-source software
Computer science
Artificial intelligence Compiler construction Early computer science Operating systems Programming languages Prominent pioneers Software engineering
Modern concepts
General-purpose CPUs Graphical user interface Internet Laptops Personal computers Video games World Wide Web Cloud
By country
Bulgaria Eastern Bloc Poland Romania South America Soviet Union Yugoslavia
Timeline of computing
before 1950 1950–1979 1980–1989 1990–1999 2000–2009 2010–2019 2020–present more timelines ...
Glossary of computer science
Category

This article presents a detailed timeline of events in the history of computing from 2020 to the present. For narratives explaining the overall developments, see the history of computing.

Significant events in

• events in general robotics
• events about uses of computational tools in biotechnology and similar fields (except for improvements to the underlying computational tools) as well as events in media-psychology except when those are directly linked to computational tools

Currently excluded are:

• events in computer insecurity/
  hacking incidents/breaches/Internet conflicts/malware
  if they aren't also about milestones towards computer security
• events about quantum computing and communication
• economic events and events of new technology policy beyond standardization

2024

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2023

AI

• Chatbot and text-generating AI, ChatGPT (released on 30 Nov 2022), a large language model, became popular, with some considering the large public's attention as unwarranted hype as potential applications are limited. Similar software such as Cleverbot existed for many years, and the software is, on the fundamental level, not structured toward accuracy – e.g. providing seemingly credible but incorrect answers to queries and operating "without a contextual understanding of the language" – but only toward essentially the authenticity of mimicked human language.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} It was estimated that only two months after its launch, it had 100 million active users.^[7] Applications may include solving or supporting school writing assignments,^[8] malicious social bots (e.g. for misinformation, propaganda, and scams),^[9][10] and providing inspiration (e.g. for artistic writing or in design or ideation in general).^[11][12]

• Google released
  Bard due to effects of the ChatGPT release,^[13] with potential for integration into its Web search and, like ChatGPT software, also as a software development helper tool.^[14] DuckDuckGo released the DuckAssist feature integrated into its search engine that summarizes information from Wikipedia to answer search queries that are questions. The experimental feature was shut down without explanation on 12 April.^[15][16][17] There has been further development regarding LLMs or ChatGPT as user interfaces of Wikipedia or as software using its structured knowledge by others.^[18][19] A proprietary feature by scite.ai was released that delivered answers that use research papers and provide citations for the quoted paper(s). It may demonstrate an alternative approach to ChatGPT whose fundamental algorithms are not designed to generate text that is true, including for example "hallucinations" and fake citations or misinformation more generally.^[20][21] Elicit.org may provide a free alternative to this tool.^[22][23] A broader alternative approach to the software's Q&A applications and use of text generation for assignments may be the improvement of media literacy and Web search skills in education
  systems.

• Further
  Stability AI launched an open source LLM.^[31]

• A method for editing NeRF scenes, a novel media technique from 2020,^[32] with natural language commands was demonstrated by Nvidia.^[33][34]
• An open letter "Pause Giant AI Experiments" initiated by the Future of Life Institute called for "AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4" due to "profound risks to society and humanity".^[35][36] It received substantial media attention and also contributed to speculations about perceived large LLM potential). At the time there was extensive media coverage of views that regard ChatGPT as a potential step towards AGI or sentient machines, also extending to some academic works (e.g. a popular preprint by a company).^[1] The coverage focused on such views may not represent the majority expert views and, for example, some researchers noted that e.g. the ability to generate coherent text and imitations are not the same as understanding language.^[37] A set of techniques under development included self-refining code or text.^[38]
• question and answers threads
  .
• News outlets reported on a
  reasoning-algorithms but remains inferior to clinicians.^[41][42][43] As of 2023, humans often – if not most often – conduct query-based web searches, read websites and/or conduct physical doctor's visits to inquire health information, despite various difficulties,^{[44][45][46][47]} partly as they typically did not undergo any formal training in media literacy,^[48] digital literacy^[49][50] or health literacy,^[51] as such is not part of schools curricula in most education systems as of 2023.^[51][48][49]
• A novel potentially significantly more efficient
  text-to-image approach, as implemented in MUSE, was reported.^[52][53]
• A first successful autonomous long-duration operation, including simulated
  F-16 fighter jet, X-62A, by two AI software was reported.^[54][55][56]
• A
  voice with just three seconds of voice data and may produce the most natural-sounding results to date, was reported in a preprint.^[57][58]
• A use of world models for a wide range of domains that make decisions using e.g. different 3D worlds and reward frequencies and outperforms previous approaches, DreamerV3, was reported as a step towards
  general artificial intelligence in a preprint.^[59][60]
• A large language model, ProGen, that can generate functional protein sequences with a predictable function, with input including tags specifying protein properties, was reported.^[61][62]
• A
  epigenetic-editing was reported.^[63][64]
• Software for generating 3D dynamic scenes (text-to-4D), MAV3D, was reported.^[65][66]
• A study reported the development of deep learning algorithms to identify technosignature candidates, finding 8 potential alien signals not detected earlier.^[67][68]
• An
  first international summit on military AI led to a joint unbinding statement by the U.S., China and other nations, with some external calls for starting negotiations on an internationally binding law or an enforcement-mechanisms-driven law.^[72]
• The world's first
  generative AI was approved for human use, with clinical trials expected to begin in China. The new drug, ISM3312, was developed by Insilico Medicine.^[73]
• The LLM GPT-4 was launched by OpenAI.^[74][75] It and ChatGPT based on it continued to receive major global media attention.
• Researchers suggested that growing influence of industry in AI research means that "public interest alternatives for important AI tools may become increasingly scarce".^[76]
• Google revealed
  PaLM-E, an embodied multimodal language model with 562 billion parameters.^[77][78]

• Researchers demonstrated an open source 'AI scientist' that can create models of natural phenomena from knowledge axioms and experimental data, showing the software can rediscover physical laws like "Kepler's third law of planetary motion, Einstein's relativistic time-dilation law, and Langmuir's theory of adsorption" using logical reasoning and a few data points.^[80][79]

• Researchers demonstrated a non-invasive
  transformer machine learning. Prior training data is required for this semantic decoding. Participants listened to stories for 16 hours while their brain activity was recorded.^[81]
• A new AI algorithm developed by
  mRNA vaccines by 128 times.^[82]

• Computational neuroscientists showed that people with
  solve difficult problems and that their higher synchrony between brain areas allowed for better integration of evidence (or progress) from preceding working memory sub-problem processing. Reducing synchrony in "avatar" simulations, that were adjusted and tuned towards personalization, "led decision-making circuits to quickly jump to conclusions". Their codified results may be useful for an understanding of cognition to replicate or imitate in bio-inspired computing.^[84][83]
• AI was used to develop an experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which is shown to be effective against A. baumannii.^[85]

• A machine learning model is trained to recognise the key features of chemicals with senolytic activity. It finds three chemicals – ginkgetin, periplocin and oleandrin – able to remove senescent cells without damaging healthy cells.^[86][87]
• Articles in science outlets like Nature suggest contemporary viral concerns about hypothetical
  existential risk of AI "plays into the tech companies' agenda" – partly in the form of 'criti-hype'^[88] – and that this "hinders effective regulation of the societal harms AI is causing right now" and in the near-future.^[89]
• A science writer provides an overview of "the nascent industry of AI-designed drugs".^[90]

• A preprint introduces the concept of "thought cloning" by which AI use data of or imitate human thinking.^[91]

• Metaresearchers showed that AI trained with study-author-networks data could generate scientifically promising "alien" hypotheses that would likely not be considered otherwise.^[92]
• A study provides an overview and living review of open source LLMs, assessing the levels of openness of their differentiated elements and reviewing the risks of relying on proprietary software or the importance of open source AI.^[93]

• mammography screening was demonstrated to have the potential to substantially reduce workload and to possibly improve cancer detection rates.^[94]
• A
  review outlined applications and challenges of using AI to accelerate science.^[95]
• A study that won an international competition demonstrated an approach that predicted 70% of earthquakes, suggesting some form of earthquake prediction may be feasible in the future.^[96]
• Researchers released a large set of audiobooks for free books in Project Gutenberg created automatically via generative AI with near-natural voice.^[97]
• A natural language system was demonstrated that can provide explanations for the conclusion-making of machine learning models for explainable AI.^[98][99]
• A preprint reported some large language models have an 'extractable memorization' flaw by which training data can be extracted at affordable costs by queries.^[100]
• Google DeepMind announced its Gemini multimodal language model, which it claims has advanced "reasoning capabilities" and can outperform GPT-4 on a variety of tasks.^{[101][102][103][104]}
• A new class of
  explainable deep learning.^[105][106]

• Notable innovation products: an
  open source AI software for protein design (RFdiffusion) was introduced,^[111] multimodal biomedical Med-PaLM M was introduced.^[112]

• A two/multi-robot and beacons
  underwater robots was reported.^[113][114]
• Researchers showed parrots
  videocalling system.^[115][116]
• A 'chef' robot developed is trained to watch and learn from cooking videos, and recreate dishes itself.^[117][118]
• Autonomous drones won first races against human champions of FPV drone racing.^[119]

• An autonomous laboratory for synthesis of inorganic powders, the A-Lab.^[120]

• Notable innovations: a low-cost
  EEG helmet with significant accuracy of decoding thought words to text (DeWave).^[124][125]

• Researchers showed that, or how, pre-installed apps on Android smartphones in China are used for mass surveillance in China.^[126][127]
• Scientists
  reviewed safety-by-design technology- and policy-based approaches to ensure biosafety and biosecurity to prevent engineered pathogen pandemics, including digital methods such as DNA sequence screening, some of which are already implemented and part of regulations to some degree.^{[128][additional citation(s) needed}
  ]
• Studies investigated dating apps, revealing high gender inequality,^[129] partly exploring possible relevance to the rise of both "sexual loneliness" and concentration of sex in various developed countries,^[129] and reported subsets of well-being effects.^{[130][129][131][132]}
• A study hypothesized
  which?] may have contributed to the recent rise in reported mental health problems – by intensifying and over-diagnosing of such – beyond e.g. increased reporting of previously under-recognised symptoms or mental health-related issues.^[133][134]
• A news outlet reported on a
  VPNs for Internet privacy and security.^[135][136]
• Researchers reported 'digital resignation', calling for regulations and education reform.^[137]
• Parts of Twitter's recommender algorithms became open source, welcomed and requested by many albeit with several issues related to code exclusion and verifiability.^{[138][139][140]} Around the time, the free version of its API, which was also used for research, esd shut down^[141] – followed shortly thereafter by reddit,^[142] proprietary verification checkmarks caused controversy,^[143] parts of its source code were leaked,^[144] and applications of a "state-affiliated media" label – which purportedly uses "Category:Publicly funded broadcasters" data which, like the label, does not differentiate and list the shares of funding sources – caused controversy.^[145][146] In April, Twitter was warned by EU digital policy-makers after a report indicated its recent policies "boost" Russian disinformation-based propaganda.^[147]
• One of the first empirical studies on what real users are shown during their typical use of popular
  better source needed] in 2022 suggested YouTube may also show ethically disputed advertising other than science-related misinformation such as extensively showing "scam ads".^{[152][153][154]}
• An umbrella review summarized the research on benefits and risks associated with digital media use by youths, suggesting caregivers, policymakers and researchers should continue to move away from prevailing oversimplified recommendations to reduce screen time to instead focus on distinguished types of screen use.^[155]

• An experimental study reported
  search engines return lower-quality information. It suggests media literacy programs with tested strategies and solutions for identified search engines issues are needed.^[156]
• The concept of enshittification] about the quality of content on social media platforms introduced in 2022 gained traction.^[157][158]

• Notable innovations: a
  Lemmy and Kbin which can synchronize their posts via interoperability,^{[162][163][164]} the first upgrade of the Global Earthquake Model data for disaster risk reduction,^[165][166] and the misinformation-countering system Community Notes became relatively widely used on X (formerly Twitter).^[167]

• Researchers demonstrated an open-brain surgery-free
  Stentrode, that can record brain activity from a nearby blood vessel, showing it can be used to operate a computer.^[168][169]
• News outlets reported on a study (21 Nov. 2022) demonstrating locust antennae implanted as biosensors into (bio-hybrid) robots for AI-interpreted machine olfaction.^[170][171]

• Scientists coalesced recent developments (see also
  brain organoids into a new field they term organoid intelligence (OI), seeking to harness OI for computing – as a novel type of AI – in an ethically responsible way. Networks of such miniature tissues could become functional using stimulus-response training or organoid-computer interfaces – to potentially become "more powerful than silicon-based computing" for a range of tasks – and could also be used for research of various pathophysiologies, brain development, human learning, memory and intelligence, and new therapeutic approaches against brain diseases.^[172][173]
• Biological organoid intelligence, 'Brainoware', was demonstrated to solve computational tasks in a preprint, with implications for bioethics and potential bottlenecks and limits of nonbio-AI.^[174][175]
• A study demonstrated functional
  microbot containing neurons, 'Mag-Neurobot', in a mouse "organotypic hippocampal slice" as physical (semi-) artificial neurons.^[176][177]
• Researchers reported the development of a fuel cell implant powered by blood glucose. It can also release insulin at certain levels and have enough energy to allow smartphone implant control.^[178][179]

• Researchers reported the development of
  neuromorphic AI hardware using nanowires (see also 2020-04-20) physically mimicking the brain's activity in identifying and remembering an image from memory.^[181][182] A university reported on a demonstration of multisensory motion cue integration by a neuromorphic nerve for robots.^[180]

• Researchers demonstrated
  optogenetic circuits. The 'biological camera' extends chemical and electrical interface techniques.^[183][184]
• Researchers demonstrated the use of
  Organoid Intelligence, 'Brainoware', for speech recognition.^[185]

• proteins, essentially all of those known to science.^[186][187]

  Further information: Protein structure prediction

• News outlets reported
  open source software, making the technology more accessible and free to use on personal hardware as well as extendable by third-parties (i.e. other software projects).^[198][199]

• A new deep learning technique enabled year-round measurements of sea ice thickness in the Arctic.^[200][201]

• A screening AI system for many cancer types that integrates different types of data via multimodal learning was reported.^[202][203]

• Researchers reported the development of a deep learning system that learns intuitive physics from visual data (of virtual 3D environments) to some degree "from scratch" based on an unpublished approach inspired by studies of visual cognition in infants.^[204][205] Two weeks later, other researchers reported the development of a machine learning algorithm that could discover sets of basic variables of various physical systems and predict the systems' future dynamics from video recordings of their behavior.^[206][207]
  Further information: Machine learning in physics § Physics discovery and prediction

• Researchers reported the development of deep learning software that can design proteins that contain prespecified functional sites.^[208][209]
  Further information: Protein design § Algorithms

Software-hardware systems

• The first laparoscopic surgery performed entirely by a robot was reported^{[image needed]}.^[210][211]

• Researchers demonstrated semi-automated testing for
  which is lacking especially in cancer research) via extraction of statements about experimental results in non-semantic, gene expression cancer research papers and subsequent testing with breast cancer cell lines via robot scientist "Eve".^[213][212]

  Further information: Applications of artificial intelligence § Novel types of machine learning
• Agilicious, an
  open-hardware versatile standardized quadrotor drone, tailored toward agility, was released.^[214][215]

  Further information: Open-source robotics
• A university reported the
  better source needed]^[218]
• News outlets reported deployment, research and development of novel
  electronic ones.^{[224][221][226][227]}
• The first data transmission to exceed 1
  petabit per second (Pbit/s) using a single laser and a single optical chip was demonstrated by European researchers.^[228][229]
• News outlets reported a novel agricultural robot for viable weed control using lasers^{[image needed]} or "laserweeding".^[230] There are similar precision agriculture machines that have been reported before, also e.g. applying low amounts of herbicides and fertilizers with precision while mapping plant locations, in some cases autonomously.^[231][232] Their benefits may include "healthier crops and soil, decreased herbicide use, and reduced chemical and labor costs".^[230]
• A satellite-free
  GPS-alternative higher-resolution positioning system using existing telecommunications networks was demonstrated, SuperGPS.^[233][234]
• Impossible Metals announced its first
  polymetallic nodule rocks from the seabed nearly without harming the environment (as compared to other seabed mining) to help address the rising global need for metals for renewable energy system components – mainly batteries. It operates autonomously and uses advanced computer vision, e.g. using AI to determine which rocks have signs of visible life on them so that they are not harvested.^[235]

• A report by the Royal Society listed potential or proposed countermeasures against misinformation, mainly online misinformation, such as, broadly described, building resilience to scientific misinformation and a healthy online information environment.^[236]
  Further information: Misinformation § Online misinformation
• about human history, ancestry and evolution. It demonstrates a novel computational method for estimating how human DNA is related, in specific as a series of 13 million linked trees along the genome, a tree-sequence, which has also been called "the largest human family tree".^{[image needed][237][238][239]}

  Further information: Computational genomics
• Researchers reported the creation of a version control system for cell engineering, suggesting it to be a "significant step toward more open, reproducible, easier to trace and share, more trustworthy engineering biology", and possibly increased safety by enabling faster tracing of organisms lab of origin and design details via barcoding.^[240][241]
• A preprint demonstrated how backdoors can be placed undetectably into classifying (e.g. posts as "spam" or well-visible "not spam") machine learning models which are often developed and/or trained by third parties. Parties can change the classification of any input, including in cases with types of data/software transparency, possibly including white-box access.^{[242][243][244]}
  Further information: Machine learning § Other limitations and vulnerabilities
• Researchers reported routes for recycling 200 industrial waste chemicals into important drugs and agrochemicals using a software for computer-aided chemical synthesis design, helping enable "circular chemistry" as a potential area of a circular economy.^[245][246]
  Further information: Drug design § Computer-aided drug design
• The first global, interactive AI- and
  ocean pollution was published.^[247][248]

  Further information: Environmental monitoring

• A study suggested that in children at age 9–12 during two years time, gaming or watching digital videos can be positively correlated with measures of intelligence, albeit correlations with overall screen time (including social media, socializing and TV) were not investigated and 'time gaming' did not differentiate between categories of video games (e.g. shares of games' platform and genre).^[250][249]
  Further information: Digital media use and mental health § Impact on cognition
• Computing and the
  Russian–Ukrainian cyberwarfare and Russian information war against Ukraine