Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion as open-source. For the first time, high-quality text-to-image AI runs on consumer GPUs. The open-source AI ecosystem explodes.

OpenAI releases Whisper, an open-source speech recognition model approaching human-level accuracy on multiple languages. Transcription moves from SaaS to local.

NVIDIA H100 Hopper ships with Transformer Engine, FP8 support, and 3-4x speedup for LLM training vs A100. H100 quickly becomes the most valuable AI hardware on the planet.