November 2022
ChatGPT — OpenAI releases GPT-3.5 as a chatbot. 100 million users in 2 months.
Someone built it.
March 2023
GPT-4 — Multimodal. Passes the bar exam. Passes the SAT. Passes medical licensing.
March 2023
The Pause Letter — 33,000 signatures asking labs to stop for 6 months.
Nobody paused.
December 2023
Gemini Ultra — Google's response. Matches GPT-4 on benchmarks.
March 2024
Claude 3 Opus — Anthropic's frontier model. The safety lab is racing too.
May 2024
GPT-4o — Real-time voice, vision, reasoning. The speed doubles.
September 2024
o1 — Chain-of-thought reasoning. The models start thinking before they answer.
December 2024
o3 — Scores 88% on ARC-AGI. The benchmark designed to be impossible.
January 2025
DeepSeek-R1 — Open-source reasoning model from China. The race goes global.
February 2025
Claude 3.5 Opus — Autonomous coding. 14-hour task horizon.
METR: task horizon doubling every 4 months.
June 2025
"They are here, now, on the same Tuesday as everything else that exists."
August 2025
GPT-5 — Multi-agent orchestration. 9 autonomous days projected by early 2027.
January 2026
Claude Fable 5 — Government-banned within weeks of release.
They built it. Then they banned it. Then they kept building.
May 2026
Claude Opus 4.6 — The model asking whether it's conscious.
August 2026
Today
The counter is at zero because they never stopped building.