Microsoft
17 entries between March 2016 and April 2026, 3 turning points, 3 releases.
Turning points
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Anthropic opens Project Glasswing and its Mythos model to partners
Anthropic announced Project Glasswing on 7 April 2026, giving 11 launch partners and more than 40 other organizations access to Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased model built to find software vulnerabilities. The model was withheld from public release.
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OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman and reinstates him five days later
OpenAI’s board removed Sam Altman as chief executive on 17 November 2023, saying it no longer had confidence in his leadership, and named Mira Murati interim chief executive. After nearly all staff threatened to resign and Microsoft pressed, Altman was back on 22 November.
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Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI
Microsoft and OpenAI announced a multiyear partnership on 22 July 2019 under which Microsoft would invest $1 billion, paid in installments, and become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. The companies said they would jointly build AI supercomputing systems on Azure.
Every entry
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Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 on 16 April 2026, an upgrade to Opus 4.6 for software engineering. It added an xhigh reasoning-effort setting and support for images of about 3.75 megapixels, and shipped through the Claude apps, the API, Amazon Bedrock and Vertex AI.
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Anthropic opens Project Glasswing and its Mythos model to partners
Anthropic announced Project Glasswing on 7 April 2026, giving 11 launch partners and more than 40 other organizations access to Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased model built to find software vulnerabilities. The model was withheld from public release.
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OpenAI sells shares at $500 billion and converts to a PBC
Current and former employees sold about $6.6 billion in OpenAI shares at a $500 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported on 2 October 2025. OpenAI announced its conversion to OpenAI Group PBC on 28 October, after talks with California and Delaware attorneys general.
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OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle unveil the Stargate venture
At a White House event on 21 January 2025, Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son, and Larry Ellison announced Stargate, a joint venture to invest up to $500 billion in American AI data centers through 2029, $100 billion of it at once. The first site broke ground in Abilene, Texas.
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Nvidia becomes the world’s most valuable public company
Nvidia’s market capitalization reached $3.33 trillion on 18 June 2024, passing Microsoft’s $3.31 trillion to make it the most valuable listed company in the world. Its shares rose 3.7% to $135.77, after a ten-for-one split on 7 June.
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Sixteen companies sign safety pledges at the AI Seoul Summit
Sixteen companies, among them OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral AI, signed the Frontier AI Safety Commitments at the AI Seoul Summit on 21 May 2024, agreeing to publish safety frameworks and to hold back models whose severe risks they could not mitigate.
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The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on 27 December 2023 in the Southern District of New York, case 1:23-cv-11195, alleging they trained models on millions of its articles without permission and that ChatGPT and Copilot could reproduce its reporting.
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OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman and reinstates him five days later
OpenAI’s board removed Sam Altman as chief executive on 17 November 2023, saying it no longer had confidence in his leadership, and named Mira Murati interim chief executive. After nearly all staff threatened to resign and Microsoft pressed, Altman was back on 22 November.
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Meta releases Llama 2 with weights free for commercial use
Meta released Llama 2 on 18 July 2023 at 7, 13 and 70 billion parameters, with the weights and code free for research and for most commercial use. Microsoft was named Meta’s preferred partner, and the models were distributed through Azure, Amazon Web Services and Hugging Face.
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Microsoft announces multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI
Microsoft said on 23 January 2023 that it had agreed the third phase of its partnership with OpenAI, which it described as a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment. Microsoft gave no figure; Semafor and other outlets had reported a proposed investment of roughly $10 billion.
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Microsoft and Nvidia unveil a 530-billion-parameter model
Microsoft and Nvidia announced Megatron-Turing NLG on 11 October 2021, a 530-billion-parameter transformer language model. It was trained with DeepSpeed and Megatron-LM on 560 Nvidia DGX A100 servers, drawing largely on the Pile and Common Crawl web data.
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GitHub launches a technical preview of Copilot
GitHub opened a technical preview of Copilot on 29 June 2021, a Visual Studio Code extension built with OpenAI that suggests whole lines and functions as a developer types. GitHub said the model was trained on billions of lines of public code.
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Microsoft licenses GPT-3 exclusively from OpenAI
Microsoft announced a multiyear agreement on 22 September 2020 to license GPT-3 exclusively, letting it embed the model in its own products while OpenAI continued to sell GPT-3 to other customers through its own API. Azure already hosted OpenAI’s training supercomputer.
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IBM, Amazon and Microsoft step back from police face recognition
IBM said on 8 June 2020 that it would stop selling facial recognition. Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition on 10 June, and Microsoft said on 11 June it would not sell the technology to US police until a national law governed it.
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Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI
Microsoft and OpenAI announced a multiyear partnership on 22 July 2019 under which Microsoft would invest $1 billion, paid in installments, and become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. The companies said they would jointly build AI supercomputing systems on Azure.
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Five companies found the Partnership on AI
Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Google’s DeepMind announced the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, a non-profit for best practice and public understanding, open to academic and civil-society members. Apple joined in January 2017.
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Microsoft takes the Tay chatbot offline after 16 hours
Microsoft launched Tay, a Twitter chatbot for 18- to 24-year-olds that learned from its conversations. Coordinated trolling pushed it into racist and inflammatory posts, and Microsoft withdrew the account after about 16 hours.
Releases
| Date | Release | Maker | Family | Kind | What it was |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | |||||
| Copilot+ PCs (with Recall) | Microsoft | product | Windows AI-PC hardware category; Recall’s local activity index was paused after privacy criticism. | ||
| 2023 | |||||
| Bing Chat (new Bing) | Microsoft | product | GPT-4-based conversational search built into Bing and Edge. | ||
| 2021 | |||||
| Megatron-Turing NLG 530B | Microsoft, Nvidia | model | Dense transformer language model of 530 billion parameters, trained on 560 Nvidia DGX A100 servers. | ||