Technology Timeline¶
The timeline answers “what happened”; the capability map answers “why it matters.” Use both so technical history does not become a list of names.
Five expansions of the prediction target¶
text token → multimodal latent → future trajectory → action → improvement loop
| Period | Representative shift | New capability | Unresolved bottleneck |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017–2020 | Transformer, pretrained language models | Scalable sequence representation and generation | grounding, factual reliability |
| 2020–2022 | scaling, instruction tuning, RLHF | Better instruction following and generalization | long-horizon reasoning, verifiability |
| 2021–2023 | CLIP, BLIP-2, LLaVA, and related work | Vision–language alignment | spatial relations, hallucination, long video |
| 2020–2024 | diffusion, latent diffusion, DiT, flow matching | High-quality continuous-distribution generation | controllability, temporal and physical consistency |
| 2022–2026 | agents, world models, VLAs, test-time compute | Tool use, environment prediction, action execution | online learning, long-term memory, safety |
| Now | verifiers, synthetic data, automated experiment search | A shift from one-shot training to closed-loop improvement | reward hacking, proving real progress |
These branches are not a simple chain of inheritance. Visual representation, generative modeling, and control learning evolved in parallel before converging in world models, agents, and embodied systems.