Interactive timelines of exponential tech progress – showing growth, compression, and scaling laws enabling modern AI.
- AI Compute Timeline (Interactive)
- Adoption Timeline (Interactive)
- Energetic Scaling (Interactive)
- Civilization Scaling (Interactive)
- Energy Leverage (Interactive)
Training FLOPs milestones for AI history – from vacuum tubes to frontier models.
- Interactive: View Full Interactive Version (Plotly – Hover/Zoom)
- Static: PNG | SVG
- Details: ai-compute-timeline/
Zoom recommended for 2010+ frontier cluster (10²⁴–10²⁷+ range).
Time to ~50M users adoption – shows exponential compression from years to days.
- Interactive: View Full Interactive Version (Plotly – Hover/Zoom)
- Static: PNG | SVG
- Details: adoption-timeline/
From ~10 years (1957) to ~60 days (2022) – a 60x+ acceleration, with AI pushing toward near-instant scaling.
Neural efficiency vs. body size (Biology) and compute efficiency vs. time (Tech) – both reveal power laws.
- Interactive: View Full Interactive Version (Plotly – Hover/Zoom)
- Static: PNG | SVG
- Details: energetic-scaling/
Humans are the biological outlier (EQ~7); AI is the technological outlier (75 quadrillion-fold compute/$ since 1939).
Multi-lane log-time timeline showing how four fundamental metrics have scaled from 1M years ago to 2030+.
- Interactive: View Full Interactive Version (Plotly – Hover/Zoom)
- Static: PNG | SVG
- Details: civilization-scaling/
Log-time compresses ~99% of human existence (pre-writing) into the left side, expanding modern acceleration on the right. Phase flips (Fire → Agriculture → Writing → Printing → Internet → AI) stack to enable exponential progress.
How much total energy does an average human command compared to the metabolic baseline (~114 W)?
- Interactive: View Full Interactive Version (Plotly – Hover/Zoom)
- Static: PNG | SVG
- Details: energy-leverage-per-person/
Humans went from ~1–2× body energy (foragers) to ~17× body energy (modern). The post-1750 coal/steam and post-1950 oil/electricity jumps dominate the visual story.
| Timeline | Shows | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| Compute | Training FLOPs (10⁰ → 10²⁷) | Exponential growth ↑ |
| Adoption | Time to 50M users | Exponential compression ↓ |
| Energetic | Neurons/kg & cps/$ | Power laws (log-log linear) |
| Civilization | Energy/Coord/Memory/Repl | Stacking infrastructure layers |
| Energy Leverage | Watts/person vs metabolic | ~17× body energy (modern) |
Together they illustrate:
- Compute: Raw exponential growth enabling AI scale
- Adoption: Ecosystem acceleration compressing timelines
- Energetic: Fundamental scaling rules – humans and AI as outliers
- Civilization: How infrastructure layers (fire → writing → internet → AI) enable each successive leap
- Energy Leverage: Per-person energy command from foragers (~2×) to modern (~17×)
Inspired by Kurzweil, Epoch AI, Statista, Asymco, Herculano-Houzel (neuronal scaling), Kleiber (metabolic 0.75), Kaplan/Charnov (LHT/OFT).
Each plot follows a standardized structure:
<plot-name>/
├── index.html # Interactive page (uses shared/site.css)
├── data/
│ ├── <slug>.csv # Source data
│ └── meta.json # Metadata: title, description, fields, sources
├── output/
│ ├── *_interactive.html # Plotly interactive chart
│ ├── *_highres.png # High-res PNG export
│ └── *.svg # SVG vector export
├── src/
│ ├── *.py # Matplotlib static generator
│ └── *_plotly.py # Plotly interactive generator
└── README.md
shared/site.css– Common styles for all pagesshared/site.js– Navigation bar injectionscripts/validate_all.py– Validate all plots (run:python scripts/validate_all.py)
pip install -r requirements.txtpython build_all.pycd <plot-name>/src
python <slug>.py # Static PNG/SVG
python <slug>_plotly.py # Interactive HTMLpython scripts/validate_all.pyIdeas, new milestones, or bug reports welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md.
MIT