AI boom

AI boom

“ChatGPT in November 2022 set off a race for bigger models, more chips and more data centres that made Nvidia the world's most valuable company and is still running.”

The AI boom is the period, still running, in which artificial intelligence stopped being a research field and became the biggest business in the world. It began on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI, a San Francisco laboratory founded as a non-profit in 2015, released ChatGPT, a chatbot built on its GPT-3.5 language model, as a free research preview. Within two months it had 100 million users, faster than any consumer app before it. People who had never thought about AI were suddenly asking a computer to write their emails, their essays and their code, and getting fluent answers.

The technology behind it was a decade in the making: deep learning's breakthrough in image recognition in 2012, Google's transformer architecture of 2017, and models trained on ever larger slices of the internet with ever more computing power. What changed in 2022 was that the models became good enough, and easy enough, for everyone. Image generators such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney arrived the same year; GPT-4 followed in March 2023; Google, Meta, Anthropic and others raced to match or beat each model, and Chinese laboratories joined in.

Money followed. Microsoft put a multibillion-dollar investment into OpenAI in January 2023. Nvidia, whose graphics chips turned out to be the engines of the new models, became the first chipmaker worth a trillion dollars in May 2023, the most valuable company in the world in June 2024, and the first company worth five trillion dollars in October 2025. The big technology companies poured hundreds of billions into data centres and the electricity to run them; the Stargate project announced in January 2025 promised 500 billion dollars for American AI infrastructure alone. When the Chinese laboratory DeepSeek released a model in January 2025 that it said had cost a fraction of what American ones did, Nvidia lost 589 billion dollars of value in one day, the largest fall in market history.

Governments tried to keep up. An open letter in March 2023 asked for a six-month pause in training the largest models; it was not granted. The White House brought the companies' chief executives in that May and issued an executive order on AI safety in October, which the next president revoked on his first day in office. Britain gathered twenty-eight countries at Bletchley Park in November 2023 to declare that frontier AI could cause serious harm; the European Union's AI Act came into force in August 2024 and its main rules apply from August 2026. The field's pioneers were honoured too: the 2024 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry both went to work in AI, to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield for neural networks and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for predicting protein structures.

The boom's own turbulence was part of the story: OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman in November 2023 and had him back within two weeks after almost all of the staff threatened to leave; lawsuits over training data, deepfakes and the chatbots' effect on vulnerable users multiplied; and by 2025 economists were asking whether the spending was a bubble. Whether or not it is, the period has already changed how software is written, how students study and how companies hire, and it is the first technological revolution that an educated person has watched arrive in real time.

What happened

  1. 2022

  2. OpenAI releases ChatGPT, a chatbot fine-tuned from GPT-3.5, as a free research preview at chat.openai.com.

    Pioneer Building, 3180 18th Street, San Francisco: OpenAI's headquarters when ChatGPT was released
  3. 2023

  4. ChatGPT reaches 100 million users in its second month, the fastest growth of any consumer app; TikTok had taken nine months and Instagram more than two years.

  5. Microsoft announces the third phase of its partnership with OpenAI, a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment, and the supercomputers to go with it.

  6. An open letter signed by thousands of researchers and executives asks all laboratories to pause for six months the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4; no one pauses.

  7. OpenAI releases GPT-4, a model that also reads images and scores in the top tenth of a simulated bar exam.

  8. Vice President Harris and President Biden meet the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Alphabet at the White House to press them on safety.

  9. Nvidia's shares briefly take it above one trillion dollars, the first chipmaker to get there, after it forecasts sales far above expectations on demand for AI chips.

    Nvidia headquarters, Santa Clara: the chips that run the boom

  10. President Biden signs Executive Order 14110 on safe, secure and trustworthy AI, requiring safety-test reports for the largest models.

  11. Twenty-eight countries, including the United States and China, sign the Bletchley Declaration at the AI Safety Summit, agreeing that frontier AI could cause serious, even catastrophic, harm.

    Bletchley Park: the AI Safety Summit of November 1–2, 2023

  12. OpenAI's board removes Sam Altman as chief executive, saying he was not consistently candid with it; almost the whole staff threatens to leave.

  13. Altman is back as chief executive with a new initial board chaired by Bret Taylor, and Microsoft gets a seat as observer.

  14. 2024

  15. Nvidia passes Microsoft and Apple to become the world's most valuable company, at about 3.3 trillion dollars.

    Nvidia headquarters, Santa Clara: the chips that run the boom

  16. The European Union's AI Act, the first comprehensive law on AI, enters into force.

  17. The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for the foundations of machine learning; the next day the chemistry prize goes to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for designing and predicting proteins.

    Google DeepMind, King's Cross, London: AlphaFold and the Gemini models
  18. 2025

  19. DeepSeek of Hangzhou releases R1, an open-weight reasoning model that it says cost a fraction of its American rivals to train.

    Hangzhou: home of DeepSeek, whose cheap model shook the markets in January 2025

  20. OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announce Stargate, a company to spend 500 billion dollars over four years on AI data centres in the United States.

  21. Nvidia falls 17 per cent and loses 589 billion dollars of value in a day, the largest fall for any company in market history, as DeepSeek's app tops the download charts.

    Nvidia headquarters, Santa Clara: the chips that run the boom

  22. OpenAI releases GPT-5.

  23. Nvidia becomes the first company worth five trillion dollars, three months after it was the first past four trillion.

    Nvidia headquarters, Santa Clara: the chips that run the boom
  24. 2026

  25. The AI Act's main rules become applicable across the European Union, with the Commission's AI Office in charge of the largest general-purpose models.