Product history Products

ENIAC, announced on 14 February 1946, is described by the University of Pennsylvania as the first general-purpose electronic computer: a 30-ton machine with 18,000 vacuum tubes, built to produce military firing tables.

Logic Theorist, completed in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw, was the first program deliberately built to perform automated reasoning; it proved dozens of theorems from Principia Mathematica and introduced heuristics, list processing and reasoning as search.

Lisp is a programming language invented by John McCarthy at MIT in 1958, whose programs are themselves lists. It became the favoured language of early artificial intelligence research and introduced automatic garbage collection.

The Mark I Perceptron was the first hardware implementation of the perceptron algorithm: a custom analog computer built at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory for image recognition, with photocells as input and motor-driven potentiometers as learnable weights.

DENDRAL was a Stanford artificial intelligence project begun in 1964 that identified unknown organic molecules from mass spectra using chemical knowledge. It is widely described as the first expert system and the ancestor of later systems such as MYCIN and PROSPECTOR.

A free online version of Stanford's artificial intelligence course, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, which started on October 10, 2011 and drew 160,000 students from over 190 countries.

Amazon Echo is an always-on, nine-inch cylindrical speaker that answers to the name Alexa. Launched in November 2014 by invitation, it put a voice assistant into an ordinary room rather than a phone.

Google's consumer AI assistant, announced as Bard in 2023 and renamed Gemini in 2024. It is where ordinary users meet Google's Gemini models, first as a chat box and later through voice, research agents and subscriptions.

Claude apps (claude.ai) are Anthropic's chat assistant for consumers and businesses. The public beta opened with Claude 2 in 2023, and the apps have since added paid plans, Projects, web search and Research.

Manus is a general-purpose AI agent product, marketed as "Hands On AI", that runs research, slides, design, images, music and video, and shipped a new architecture, Manus 2.0, on 28 September 2026.

Google's self-driving car prototype was a modified production car that used cameras, radar and a roof-mounted laser range finder to sense traffic, drove routes that had been mapped in advance by manually driven cars, and always carried a trained safety driver and a software operator.

MYCIN was an early expert system built at Stanford in the 1970s to identify bacteria causing severe infections and recommend antibiotic treatment, notable for separating its rule base from its inference engine and for explaining its own reasoning.

Cursor is an AI code editor made by Anysphere, Inc. that lets programmers work alongside AI agents; it grew from a small Series A to a product used across the Fortune 500 and was acquired by SpaceX in 2026.

GPS was a program built at RAND to act as a universal problem-solving machine, and is credited as the first computer program to separate problem knowledge from a general solving strategy.

Fortran is a programming language for numerical and scientific computing, developed from 1954 and released by IBM in 1957. Its compiler showed that automatically translated code could run nearly as fast as hand-written machine code.

A checkers program built by Arthur Samuel at IBM, begun in 1949 and published in 1959, that learned by memorising positions, playing itself and scoring board positions, and played at a respectable amateur level.

ELIZA is an early program for holding a natural-language conversation with a computer, built at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Its DOCTOR script imitated a psychotherapist, and the readiness of users to treat it as understanding became known as the ELIZA effect.

SHRDLU was an early natural-language program built by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970 that conversed in English about a small blocks world, executing commands, answering questions and learning names — a landmark demo whose success fed an optimism later systems could not sustain.

R1, known inside Digital Equipment Corporation as XCON, was a rule-based expert system written by John P. McDermott at Carnegie Mellon University in 1978 to configure VAX computer orders automatically.

Cyc is a hand-built knowledge base and ontology of common-sense knowledge, begun by Douglas Lenat in 1984 to give software the basic concepts and rules about how the world works.

NETtalk is an artificial neural network built by Terrence Sejnowski and Charles Rosenberg that learns to convert written English into phonemes and audible speech, showing that a network trained on examples can generalize to unseen words.

Dragon Dictate, released by Dragon Systems in 1990, was the first speech-recognition product sold to consumers; at $9,000 it was costly, but it started the line of products that led to continuous speech recognition.

PC Therapist was Joseph Weintraub's conversational program; a modified version won the first annual Loebner Prize Competition in 1991, fooling five of 10 judges into thinking it was human.

C4.5 is a machine learning system that builds decision trees or if-then rules from cases with known classes. J. Ross Quinlan's 1993 book documents its C/UNIX implementation, source code, and use.

The Newton MessagePad was Apple's first handheld computer built on Newton technology, shipping on 2 August 1993 with a pen-based interface, handwriting recognition and a modular communications design.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is speech recognition software from Dragon Systems, first released in 1997 as a continuous dictation product; it turns speech into text, runs spoken commands and reads documents aloud, and is still sold today under Microsoft.

Wolfram|Alpha is a web service that answers questions by computing results rather than returning links. Built entirely in Mathematica, it went live in test mode on 15 May 2009 and was declared officially launched three days later.

Bing is Microsoft's consumer search brand, launched on 3 June 2009 and pitched as a "Decision Engine" meant to help people make faster, better-informed decisions in areas such as shopping, travel, health and local business.

Siri was a mobile app, on sale in Apple's App Store from February 2010, that turned spoken requests into answers using speech recognition, GPS and partner services. Apple bought the company behind it that April.

A free beta software development kit released by Microsoft on 16 June 2011 that let developers use the Kinect sensor's depth sensing, motion tracking and voice recognition on Windows PCs, initially for non-commercial work.

A Google search feature announced in 2012 that models real-world entities and their relationships, so that search can work with "things, not strings".

Google Now is an Android feature, announced with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean in June 2012, that pushes weather, traffic, scores and other information to users as cards at the moment they need it, without a search query.

Midjourney is an AI image generation service from Midjourney, Inc. Its open beta began on 12 July 2022 through a Discord bot, and it later added a website, video generation and new model versions.

Perplexity is an AI answer engine launched on 7 December 2022. It answers questions in natural language and cites its web sources, and it later added Deep Research, finance and shopping features and agents.

OpenRouter is a marketplace and gateway for large language models, started in early 2023, that lets developers reach hundreds of models from many providers through one interface. It reports more than 10 million users and a $113 million Series B.

Microsoft Copilot is the company's AI chatbot and assistant, which started in 2023 as Bing Chat and became a single consumer and business AI brand that now includes in-house models.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, which pairs large language models with a customer's business data.

ERNIE Bot (文心一言) is Baidu's chatbot, first released to invited testers in March 2023 and opened to the public that August. It has been offered in free and paid tiers and renamed Wenxiaoyan in 2024.

The Qwen app is Alibaba's consumer chatbot built on its Qwen models. It began as a beta of Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023 and has since added app integrations and reached 234 million users by May 2026.

A Google research and note-taking tool that answers only from the sources a user supplies and cites the passages it used. Launched in 2023 under the name Project Tailwind, it became widely known for turning documents into podcast-style Audio Overviews.

Doubao is ByteDance's AI chatbot, opened for invitation testing in August 2023 and later offering text, image and voice generation, AI search and video generation.[^1][^2]

Meta AI is Meta's conversational assistant, introduced in US beta in September 2023 on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. It was rebuilt on Llama 3 in 2024 and on Muse Spark in 2026.

Kimi is an AI chatbot from Moonshot AI, released in October 2023 and opened to the public the following month. It is known for very long context windows and has since added search, agent and coding features.

Grok is the chatbot from xAI, first offered in November 2023 to a small waitlist of US users. It has grown into a family of apps and models covering search, images, video and coding agents.

AI Overviews are AI-written summaries placed at the top of Google Search results, launched across the US in May 2024 and later joined by AI Mode, a separate search experiment. They became one of the most widely used consumer applications of generative AI.

Tencent Yuanbao is an AI assistant app from Tencent, launched on 30 May 2024, that runs on its Hunyuan models and later integrated DeepSeek-R1, HY 2.0 and Hy3.

Apple Intelligence is Apple's personal-intelligence system, announced at WWDC on 10 June 2024 for iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. It runs models on device and uses Private Cloud Compute for larger requests.

An AI-native code editor released by Codeium on 13 November 2024, built around "AI flows" that combine copilot-style collaboration with agent-style independence, and featuring the Cascade assistant, the Riptide search tool and Supercomplete.

The DeepSeek app is the company's official free chatbot, offered on the web and as mobile apps since 15 January 2025. It topped the U.S. App Store in late January 2025.

Alexa+ is Amazon's next-generation Alexa assistant, rebuilt on generative AI and introduced in February 2025. It costs $19.99 a month, is free for Prime members and can book services, order groceries and control smart-home devices.

ElevenLabs is an AI voice and media platform whose business spans voice generation, voice agents for customer experience and creative tools; it ended 2025 with $350 million in annual recurring revenue.

Suno is an AI music generator that turns prompts into finished songs, and increasingly a browser-based production suite with a studio, voice recording and stem separation.

Chinook is a checkers-playing computer program built by Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues [^1]. It became the first computer program to win a human world championship in any game, and its completed form cannot be beaten [^1].

Notion AI is Notion's set of AI features — agents, enterprise search, meeting notes and admin controls — sold per seat, with a Notion Agent that completes multi-step tasks and Custom Agents that automate recurring team work.

Runway builds generative video, image and audio tools used by more than 60 million creative users, and researches general-purpose world models that simulate video, audio and interfaces in real time.

IBM's first electronic computer, announced to shareholders in April 1952. Built as a general-purpose machine, it ran some 25 to 50 times faster than its predecessors and opened IBM's 700 series.

The AIBO Performer Kit (model ERF-510) is a motion editor released by Sony alongside its ERS-110 robot, letting owners write original movements for the robot on a personal computer and load them with an included Memory Stick.

Apache Hadoop is an open-source framework for distributed storage and processing of big data, with the Hadoop Distributed File System for storage and MapReduce for processing; it grew out of the Nutch web-search project and was first released in 2006.

Kaggle is a data science competition platform and online community founded by Anthony Goldbloom in April 2010, where most submissions are scored instantly on a live leaderboard. Google acquired it in March 2017.

XiaoIce was a Microsoft chatbot released in May 2014 that users added to WeChat group chats for reminders, lookups, weather and jokes. It drew large crowds, then was banned by WeChat three days later for breaking platform rules.

Skype Translator is a Microsoft feature that automatically translates speech and instant-message conversations. A public preview opened on 15 December 2014 with Spanish and English speech translation and more than 40 messaging languages.[^1]

A handheld machine translation device from iFlytek, first released as Xiaoyi Translator in 2016, which the company's brand history describes as creating the AI translator product category.

SenseChat is SenseTime's conversational AI product, launched on 10 April 2023 as part of the SenseNova model family with more than 100 billion parameters, first offered to government and corporate clients and later expanded through the V4 and SenseNova V6 releases.

HuggingChat is a free chatbot launched by Hugging Face on 25 April 2023 as an open-source alternative to ChatGPT. It initially ran the volunteer Open Assistant model and let users switch among open models.

v0 is Vercel's tool that turns a written description of an interface into frontend code built on React, Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui. It drew 100,000 waitlist sign-ups and moved from Alpha to Beta in October 2023.

Comet is an AI web browser from Perplexity, launched on 9 July 2025 for Windows and macOS. Built on Chromium, it has an assistant that can carry out multistep browsing tasks.

ChatGPT Atlas is a web browser built around ChatGPT, released by OpenAI for macOS on 21 October 2025. It offered an optional agent mode and browser memories, and was shut down on 9 August 2026.

Poe is a platform where creators build and share AI-powered applications — from simple prompt bots to server bots, script bots, canvas apps and API bots — reaching millions of users, with per-call creator payouts and platform-covered inference costs.

Pika is a set of AI creative tools for video, image and audio, reached through a web app as well as an iOS app, a Model Context Protocol server and a ChatGPT app, and it lists its own models alongside third-party ones.

Cinematch was Netflix's own algorithm for predicting what rating a subscriber would give a film. Its accuracy became the baseline of the Netflix Prize, a $1 million contest to beat it by 10 percent.

Synthesia is an AI video platform for business: users type a script and an AI avatar presents it, with tools for generation, dubbing, translation, screen recording and motion graphics, plus a separate Sessions line for interactive roleplay and surveys.

HeyGen is an AI video platform that turns a short recording of a person into a speaking avatar for social content, courses and business videos. Its Avatar V model is pitched at consistency across long clips and many languages.