AI-lab chronology - focus shifts, capabilities, and the EA / Open-Phil / safety-reg-arbitrage pathways

(Foundational installment of the AI-chronology Tab epic. Taxonomy first: "AI" is not "LLM." AI spans symbolic reasoning, expert systems, machine learning, reinforcement learning, computer vision, protein folding, robotics, and more. LLMs (transformer language models, 2017+) are one recently-dominant branch - this block, and the Tab it seeds, keep that distinction.)

Capability + focus timeline (fact; selected)

• 2012 - AlexNet: deep convolutional nets win ImageNet; the deep-learning era begins (vision, not language).
• 2014 - Google acquires DeepMind; GANs introduced.
• 2016 - AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol (deep RL + Monte Carlo tree search) - a non-LLM landmark.
• 2017 - "Attention Is All You Need" - the transformer, the substrate for LLMs.
• 2018-2020 - BERT/GPT-2/GPT-3: scaling laws; focus shifts hard toward large language models.
• 2020-2024 - AlphaFold solves protein structure (Nobel 2024) - again, not an LLM.
• 2022 - ChatGPT: LLMs go mass-market; the capital + attention flood begins.
• 2023-2026 - frontier race (GPT-4/5, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek), the efficiency counter-wave (fin-ai-efficiency-counter-thesis), and the compute/energy/debt buildout (spec-ai-datacenter-debt-spv).

The EA / Open-Philanthropy / safety-money pathways (fact; influence graded)

• 2017: Open Philanthropy -> OpenAI (~$30M + a board seat) - the first EA-money-into-a-frontier-lab move, framed as buying safety influence.
• Open Philanthropy (Moskovitz/Tuna) is the main EA grantmaker; SFF (Jaan Tallinn), FLI, and Longview channel money into safety orgs + policy shops.
• 2021: Anthropic spins out of OpenAI with an explicit safety framing; early capital includes ~$500M tied to FTX/SBF (later in the bankruptcy estate).
• These rails feed the safety-policy apparatus (Encode, think tanks) that produced the pause/pacing letters - the predicate in spec-buist-v-anthropic-pacing.

Safety regulation as arbitrage? (interpretation, labeled)

• 2024: California SB 1047 (mandatory frontier testing + kill-switch + liability), co-sponsored by Encode, passed the legislature and was vetoed by Newsom - the template for the 2025-26 state-vs-federal fight.
• 2025-2026: the labs' collective "build the brake, don't pull it" posture (Anthropic support-with-conditions; OpenAI's shift) is what critics recode as regulatory arbitrage - safety rules that raise rivals' compliance cost and entrench incumbents - culminating in the 2026 pacing-as-cartel antitrust framing (Buist v. Anthropic) and the failed CLARITY cloture. Whether "safety" here is sincere, strategic, or both is contested; the map records the documented positions + the graded critique, not a verdict.

Honest limits

Grants, dates, milestones, and bill status = fact (amounts as reported); the "regulatory arbitrage / capture" reading = interpretation, clearly labeled; motive is not adjudicated. Structural overlay - no financial-core edges.

Sources: lab histories; Open Philanthropy / SFF / FLI grant records; SB 1047 record; the 2026 pacing fight. Cross-refs: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Open_Philanthropy, Effective_Altruism, Survival_and_Flourishing_Fund, Encode_AI, SB_1047, AI_Safety_Regulation, spec-buist-v-anthropic-pacing.

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