Stable · v1.2.1Dataset edition 2026-08-21-stable-1; historical review cutoff 2026-08-04.

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AI Research Tech Tree: static index

This no-JavaScript view contains all 324 mapped developments and 15 open directions. It preserves the core reading order; interactive relationships, filters and evidence panels require JavaScript.

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All 339 atlas entries, 1879–2026
Year	Atlas entry	Branch	Kind and editorial classification
1913	Markov chains	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1879-1928	Formal logic program (Frege→Hilbert)	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1931	Gödel incompleteness	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1936	Turing machine	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1937	Boolean circuits (Shannon's thesis)	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1943	McCulloch–Pitts neuron	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1944	Game theory (von Neumann–Morgenstern)	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1945	Stored-program computer	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1948	Cybernetics (Wiener)	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1948	Information theory	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1949	Hebbian learning	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1950	Turing test	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1952	Hodgkin–Huxley neuron model	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1956	Dartmouth workshop — 'AI' named	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1956	Cognitive revolution	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1959	Hubel & Wiesel visual cortex	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1964	Solomonoff induction	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1965	Kolmogorov complexity & MDL	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1971	NP-completeness (Cook–Karp)	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1980	Chinese Room & symbol grounding	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
1988	Symbolic vs connectionist war	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Foundational
2005	Free-energy principle	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Development; Active
2026	Active inference at scale	ROOTS · MATH, NEURO & CYBERNETICS	Open direction; Open direction
1956	Logic Theorist	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1958	LISP	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1959	General Problem Solver	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1959	Advice Taker & the logicist creed	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1965	Resolution theorem proving	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1965	DENDRAL — first expert system	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1966	Semantic networks	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1970	SHRDLU & blocks world	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1972	Prolog & logic programming	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1973-1980	Lighthill Report → first AI winter	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1974	MYCIN	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1974	Frames (Minsky)	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Foundational
1976	AM & EURISKO	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1980	Blackboard architectures	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1980	XCON at DEC	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1980	Non-monotonic logic & frame problem	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1981	Expert-systems industry	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1980	Lisp machines	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1982	Fifth Generation Project	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1983	SOAR & ACT-R architectures	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1983	Case-based reasoning	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1984	Cyc — commonsense by hand	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1988	Second AI winter	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1989	Interactive theorem provers	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Revived
1991	Inductive logic programming	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1991	Description logics & ontologies	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
1965	Fuzzy logic	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
2001	Semantic Web (RDF/OWL)	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Dormant
2012	Knowledge graphs at scale	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Revived
2019	Neuro-symbolic AI	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Active
2026	Symbolic rigor at LLM scale	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Open direction; Open direction
1950	Shannon's chess blueprint	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
1958	Alpha–beta & heuristic search	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
1968	*A search**	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
1971	STRIPS planning	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
1977	Constraint satisfaction	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
1994	Checkers conquered (Chinook)	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
1997	Deep Blue beats Kasparov	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
1998	Classical planning & PDDL	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Dormant
2001	Modern SAT/SMT solvers	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Active
2006	Monte Carlo Tree Search	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
2017	Imperfect-info games solved	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Foundational
2023	LLM-guided search	SEARCH, PLANNING & GAMES	Development; Hot frontier
1952	Multi-armed bandits	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1957	MDPs & Bellman equations	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1959	Samuel's checkers learner	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1988	Temporal-difference learning	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1989	Q-learning	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1992	TD-Gammon	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1992-2000	Policy gradients (REINFORCE → actor–critic)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1997	Dopamine = TD error	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1998	RL synthesis (Sutton & Barto)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
1999	Hierarchical RL (options)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Dormant
2013	DQN — Atari from pixels	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2016	AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2017	AlphaZero / MuZero	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2015-2017	Policy-gradient workhorses (PPO)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2017	Curiosity & intrinsic motivation	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Dormant
2017	Multi-agent RL	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Active
2018	World Models (Ha & Schmidhuber)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2019	Model-based RL (Dreamer)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Active
2019	OpenAI Five & AlphaStar	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2019	Open-endedness (POET)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Active
2020	Offline RL & sequence policies	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Active
2022	Generalist agents (Gato)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Dormant
2023	LLM agents & tool use	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Hot frontier
2024	RL on verifiable rewards	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Hot frontier
2026	Robust, general open-ended self-improvement	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Open direction; Open direction
1958	Perceptron (Rosenblatt)	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1960	ADALINE & delta rule	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1969	'Perceptrons' kills the field	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1980	Neocognitron	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1982	Hopfield networks	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Revived
1985	Boltzmann machines	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Dormant
1986	Restricted Boltzmann machines	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1986	Backpropagation	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1986	PDP & connectionism revival	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1989	Universal approximation	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1989	LeNet CNNs	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1990	Recurrent networks	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1991	Vanishing-gradient diagnosis	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
1997	LSTM	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
2006	Deep belief nets & pretraining	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2006	Autoencoders	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
2014	Attention mechanism	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
2014	Neural Turing Machines / DNC	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2015	ResNet — residual connections	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
2016	Hypernetworks & fast weights	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Dormant
2017	Transformer	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Foundational
2017	Graph neural networks	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Active
2017	Capsule networks	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2018	Neural ODEs	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Active
2017	Mixture-of-Experts	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Active
2020	Linear-attention wave	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Dormant
2021-2023	State-space models (S4→Mamba)	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Active
2025	Test-time memory (Titans)	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Hot frontier
2026	Energy-based LMs at scale	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Open direction; Open direction
1951	Stochastic gradient descent	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
1989	Catastrophic forgetting identified	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2011	ReLU, dropout & practical depth	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2014-2017	Adam → AdamW	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2015	Batch normalization	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2016	Layer normalization	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2015	Knowledge distillation	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Active
2018	Transfer learning era	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2015	Self-supervised learning	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2019	The Bitter Lesson	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2020-2022	Scaling laws → Chinchilla	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2021	LoRA & parameter-efficient tuning	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2022	Quantization & sparsity	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Active
2022	FlashAttention & kernel craft	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2023	Data curation & synthetic data	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Active
2024	Test-time compute scaling	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Hot frontier
2025	Efficient RL recipes (GRPO, R1)	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Hot frontier
2025	Continual learning push	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Hot frontier
2016	Differential privacy in ML	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Active
2017	Federated learning	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Active
2019	Deep learning theory (NTK, double descent)	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Active
2026	Sleep & memory consolidation	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Open direction; Open direction
1954-1966	Georgetown MT demo → ALPAC	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1957	Generative grammar	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
1966	ELIZA	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
1972	Scripts & conceptual dependency	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Dormant
1975	HMM speech recognition	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1980	n-gram language models	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1975	Vector-space information retrieval	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
1993	Penn Treebank & statistical NLP	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
1993	Statistical machine translation	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1995	WordNet & lexical resources	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Dormant
2003	Neural language model	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2011	IBM Watson	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2012	Deep speech recognition	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2013	word2vec / GloVe	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2014	seq2seq encoder–decoder	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2016	Neural MT deployed (GNMT)	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2018	BERT & pretrain–finetune	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2019	GPT-2 — generation scales	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2020	GPT-3 & in-context learning	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2021	Code generation (Codex→Copilot)	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Hot frontier
2022	Chain-of-thought prompting	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2022	InstructGPT — RLHF assistants	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2022	ChatGPT moment	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2023	Standalone prompt-engineer fad	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2025	Context engineering	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Hot frontier
2023	GPT-4-class multimodal LLMs	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2023	Open-weight ecosystem	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Hot frontier
2020	Retrieval-augmented generation	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Active
2023-2024	Long context (100K→1M+)	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Active
2024-2025	Reasoning models (o1→o3, R1)	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Hot frontier
2025	Diffusion language models	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Active
2025	Frontier assistants (GPT-5, Gemini 3, Claude)	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Hot frontier
2018	ELMo contextual embeddings	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
1963	Blocks-world vision	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
1979	Marr's computational vision	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
1999	Hand-crafted features (SIFT, HOG)	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2001	Viola–Jones face detection	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2009	ImageNet & benchmark culture	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2012	AlexNet — the big bang	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2015	Detection & segmentation	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2014	Face recognition surpasses humans	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2015	U-Net	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2020	Vision Transformer	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2021	CLIP — language-supervised vision	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2023	Promptable segmentation (SAM)	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Active
2020-2023	Neural 3D (NeRF→Gaussian splatting)	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Active
2024	JEPA world models (V-JEPA 2)	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Hot frontier
2023	Native multimodal models	VISION & MULTIMODAL	Development; Foundational
2013	Variational autoencoders	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Foundational
2014	GANs	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Dormant
2015	Normalizing flows	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Active
2015	DeepDream & style transfer	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2016	WaveNet & neural audio	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Foundational
2020	Diffusion models	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Foundational
2022	Text-to-image (latent + guided diffusion)	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Foundational
2023	Diffusion Transformers (DiT)	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Foundational
2023	Music & voice generation	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Active
2024-2025	Video generation (Sora→Veo 3)	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Hot frontier
2024	Interactive world models (Genie 3)	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Hot frontier
2026	Robots trained in dreamed worlds	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Open direction; Open direction
1925	Statistical inference (Fisher; Bayes)	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1960	Kalman filter	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1973	Statistical pattern recognition	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1977	EM algorithm	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1984	PAC learning & COLT	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1986	Decision trees (ID3/CART)	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1988	Bayesian networks (Pearl)	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1990	MCMC & variational inference	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Foundational
1995	SVMs & kernel methods	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Dormant
1996	Gaussian processes	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Dormant
1996	Boosting & random forests	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Active
2001	Structured prediction (CRFs)	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Dormant
2003	Topic models (LDA)	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Dormant
2007	Recommender systems	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Active
2000	Causal inference	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Active
2012	Bayesian optimization, NAS & AutoML	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Active
2012	Probabilistic programming	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Active
2016	Calibration, ensembles & conformal UQ	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Active
2026	Causal world models	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Open direction; Open direction
2026	Deep learning vs tabular data	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Open direction; Open direction
1951	Self-reproducing automata	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Foundational
1965	Evolution strategies	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Foundational
1975	Genetic algorithms	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Foundational
1987	Artificial life	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
1992	Genetic programming	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
1995	Swarm intelligence (ACO, PSO)	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
2002	Neuroevolution (NEAT)	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
1997	Spiking neural networks	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
1989	Analog VLSI neural hardware	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Foundational
2001	Reservoir computing	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
2004	Hierarchical Temporal Memory	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1994	DNA computing	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
2014	Neuromorphic chips (Loihi)	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
2014	Quantum machine learning	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Dormant
2017	Optical neural networks	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Active
2020	Analog in-memory computing	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Active
2025	LLM-guided evolution (AlphaEvolve)	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Hot frontier
2026	Learning without backprop	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Open direction; Open direction
2026	Quantum advantage for learning	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Open direction; Open direction
1961	Unimate — industrial robots	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
1968	Shakey	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
1988	Moravec's paradox	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
1986	Behavior-based robotics	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
1993	Cog & the humanoid lab era	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
1989	ALVINN drives (1989)	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
1991	SLAM	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
1994	Evolutionary & developmental robotics	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Dormant
2008	Dynamic legged locomotion	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
2005	DARPA Grand Challenge	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Foundational
2016	Simulation environments	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Active
2017	Deep RL manipulation	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Dormant
2018	Self-driving's long grind	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Active
2022	Robot foundation models	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Hot frontier
2024	Humanoid renaissance	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Hot frontier
2026	Swarms × foundation models	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Open direction; Open direction
1942	Asimov's Three Laws	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Foundational
1960	Wiener's control warning	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Foundational
1976	'Computer Power and Human Reason'	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Foundational
2000	AIXI — universal intelligence	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Dormant
2001	Agent foundations (MIRI)	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Dormant
2014	'Superintelligence' (Bostrom)	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Foundational
2016	Concrete Problems in AI Safety	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Foundational
2017	RLHF — learning from preferences	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Foundational
2016	Fairness & bias (FAccT)	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2014	Adversarial examples	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2013-2020	Early interpretability (saliency→circuits)	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2018	Debate & amplification (IDA)	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Dormant
2022	Mechanistic interpretability	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Hot frontier
2022	Constitutional AI & RLAIF	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2023	DPO & cheap preference tuning	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2023	Jailbreaks & prompt injection	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2023	Superalignment (dissolved)	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Ended / superseded (legacy)
2023	Scalable oversight & weak-to-strong	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2023	Evals & red-teaming discipline	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Hot frontier
2023	Governance era (EU AI Act, AISIs)	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2023	Guaranteed-safe AI	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Dormant
2026	Reliable interpretability-based control	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Open direction; Open direction
2026	Provable agent boundaries	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Open direction; Open direction
1965	Moore's law	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
1998	The web as dataset	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2005	Crowd labeling (MTurk)	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2007	GPGPU / CUDA	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2015	Autodiff frameworks	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2016-2025	AI accelerators (TPU→Ironwood)	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2019	Model hubs (Hugging Face)	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2018	Distributed training	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2022	Compute concentration	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Active
2023	Benchmark saturation & contamination	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Active
2024	Data walls & licensing fights	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Active
2024	Agent infrastructure (MCP)	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Hot frontier
2024	Inference economics	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Hot frontier
2024	Energy & datacenter buildout	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Active
2021	AI designs chips (AlphaChip)	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Active
2026	Post-data-wall learning	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Open direction; Open direction
2020	AlphaFold 2	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Foundational
2022	Protein LMs & generative design	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2024	AlphaFold 3 & interactions	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2022-2025	AI weather (GraphCast→GenCast)	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Foundational
2023	Materials discovery (GNoME)	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2022	Plasma & fusion control	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2024	AI mathematics (IMO gold)	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Hot frontier
2023	Medical AI deployment	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2025	Genomics models (AlphaGenome, Evo)	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2025	AI co-scientists	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Hot frontier
2026	General-purpose autonomous scientist	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Open direction; Open direction
2015-2018	Subword tokenization (BPE → SentencePiece)	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2016	Privacy attacks & model leakage	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2016	Distribution shift & OOD detection	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2011-2016	Modern imitation learning (DAgger → GAIL)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2015-2018	Deep continuous control (DDPG → SAC)	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Foundational
2017	Mixed-precision training	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Foundational
2017	Discrete neural representations & codecs	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Active
2017	Neural robustness & formal verification	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2017	Data poisoning & model backdoors	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2017	Physics-informed neural networks	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2018	Equivariant & geometric deep learning	NEURAL ARCHITECTURES	Development; Active
2019	Inner alignment & goal misgeneralization	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2018	ML compilers & tensor/kernel IRs	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Foundational
2019	Self-driving laboratories	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2019	Dense neural retrieval & dual encoders	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2019	Neural operators & learned PDE solvers	AI FOR SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS	Development; Active
2020-2022	Speech foundation models (wav2vec 2.0 → Whisper)	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2021	Instruction tuning	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2022	Flow matching & rectified flow	GENERATIVE MEDIA	Development; Hot frontier
2022	LLM inference & serving systems	COMPUTE, SYSTEMS & DATA	Development; Hot frontier
2023	Interactive agent benchmarks	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Hot frontier
2023	Generative visuomotor policies	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Hot frontier
2022	Model editing & activation steering	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Hot frontier
2023	AI control protocols	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Hot frontier
2025	Self-generated curricula & self-editing agents	REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & AGENTS	Development; Hot frontier
2017	Deep meta-learning (MAML)	TRAINING, SCALE & EFFICIENCY	Development; Active
2015	Quality-diversity search (MAP-Elites)	EVOLUTIONARY, NEUROMORPHIC & EXOTIC	Development; Active
2016	Neural-guided program synthesis	SYMBOLIC AI & KNOWLEDGE	Development; Active
2013	Computational optimal transport	PROBABILISTIC & STATISTICAL ML	Development; Active
2019	Nucleus sampling & decoding controls	LANGUAGE & LLMs	Development; Foundational
2019	Machine unlearning	SAFETY, ALIGNMENT & INTERPRETABILITY	Development; Active
2017	Language-grounded embodied planning	ROBOTICS & EMBODIED AI	Development; Active

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Ordered by era and year; horizontal distance is not proportional to elapsed time.

AI research atlas entries

Filtered developments and open directions in the AI research atlas
Year	Atlas entry	Branch	Classification	Evidence	Research guide