Watching the plot · updated September 10, 2026
The metric for AI is whether it's improving the lives of conscious creatures. AI's capability is going vertical. The things that actually matter for human beings are mostly still improving — slowly, on their own long curves. Here are both, for the whole planet, side by side.
Frontier training compute has climbed by roughly nine orders of magnitude since 2012 — a billionfold. What a model can do in one sitting is doubling about every seven months. This column is a set of hockey sticks.
Extreme poverty, child mortality, and hunger keep falling; life expectancy, literacy, and electricity keep rising. Real progress — but gentle slopes, and no visible bend where the AI curve took off.
what machines can now do — Epoch AI, METR · dots mark milestones — hover to read, click to open
The largest training compute (in floating-point operations) of any notable model published that year, on a log scale. AI capability is a story of compute.
2012–2025 · Epoch AI — Notable AI Models database
Count of models Epoch AI classifies as notable (state-of-the-art, historically significant, or highly cited) with a publication date in that year.
2012–2025 · Epoch AI — Notable AI Models database
The length of task (in the time it takes a human) that a frontier model can finish with 50% reliability. Doubling roughly every 7 months. Frozen citation read from METR's published figure.
2019–2025 · METR — Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
whether life is getting better — World Bank, World Happiness Report · the “AI era” dot is the same on every chart — watch for a bend
Share of the world living below the international extreme-poverty line.
1981–2024 · World Bank — Poverty and Inequality Platform
1960–2024 · World Bank / UN Population Division
1990–2024 · World Bank / UN IGME
Sparse annual coverage; UNESCO reports intermittently.
1975–2024 · World Bank / UNESCO Institute for Statistics
1990–2022 · World Bank / WHO Global Health Workforce
1998–2024 · World Bank / IEA — Tracking SDG7
2001–2023 · World Bank / FAO
1960–2025 · World Bank national accounts
Population-weighted world average of the Cantril self-anchoring life-evaluation ladder.
2011–2025 · World Happiness Report (via Our World in Data)
The most important part of the question is the hardest to source. These have no clean, redistributable global time series — so the honest move is to name them, not fake them. This is the frontier of the site.