Here is a simple list of ground breaking papers in the artificial intelligence field. I also included the Wikipedia links, as it can provide some contextual information about each breakthrough. By reviewing these, you can see the caliber of work required for a break through. Even though many people do research nowadays, only a small fraction of the work makes a significant impact.
- perceptron
- learned perceptron
- MLP
-
1989 Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition
- 1997 Long Short Term Memory
- 1999 Policy Gradient Methods for Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation
- 2012 Image Classification With Convolutional Neural Networks
- 2013 Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning
- 2014 Generative Adversarial Networks
- 2015 Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
- 2015 U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
- 2017 Attention Is All You Need
- 2017 Proximal Policy Optimization
- 2019 GPT-1
- 2022 InstructGPT
Further Reading
Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning
Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview