2020's Major Milestones in Artificial Intelligence

Tens of thousands of papers involving A.I. are published each year, but it will take some time before many of them make their potential real-world impact clear. Meanwhile, the top funders of A.I. -- the Alphabets, Apples, Facebooks, Baidus, and other unicorns of this world -- continue to hone much of their most exciting technology behind closed doors. In other words, when it comes to artificial intelligence, it's impossible to do a rundown of the year's most important developments in the way that, say, you might list the 10 most listened-to tracks on Spotify. But A.I. has undoubtedly played an enormous role in 2020 in all sorts of ways. Here are six of the main developments and emerging themes seen in artificial intelligence during 2020.