The Chronicle
A million years.
One scroll.
For almost all of history, humanity waited. Hundreds of thousands of years between one idea and the next. Then the waiting stopped. Scroll, and feel the gaps collapse.
- Span
- ~1,000,000 yrs
- Milestones
- —
- Shortest gap
- ~3.5 months
01 — The gaps are closing
Every leap arrives sooner than the last.
Time between consecutive breakthroughs. On a true, linear scale, the modern era is literally invisible next to the first gap. Switch scales to see it.
Dates for prehistoric events are approximate and debated; figures reflect widely cited estimates.
02 — The cadence
The version numbers stayed two years apart. Everything between them exploded.
But the headline numbers hide the real story. Between GPT-4 and GPT-5, OpenAI alone shipped GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, o1, o3, GPT-4.5 and GPT-4.1. Anthropic and xAI kept the same pace. Frontier releases went from one every couple of years to more than one a month.
Frontier model releases per year — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI combined
03 — The uptake
Time to reach one hundred million people.
Commonly cited estimates. ChatGPT figure per UBS analysis, January 2023.
04 — Next entry
The next line of this
timeline is being written now.
Probably somewhere nobody is looking. That's where we'll be.
Send a signal