For years before artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT became a household name, a breakthrough that enabled it existed as little more than a 2017 research paper that only a small group of software engineers could understand.
Eight seminal AI papers published in the last eight years by researchers at Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, OpenAI and elsewhere provided blueprints for promising technologies, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, which generate humanlike answers or photorealistic images based on a short description, respectively. Tens of millions of people and businesses have used the products based on those papers, and they have upended major tech companies—something the researchers could barely have imagined a few years ago. (Scroll down to see the list.)
