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AI has existed since the 1950s, but in the 2010s and especially 2020s, “deep learning” systems have made great strides in capability. The most prominent deep learning systems are “large language models” (LLMs) trained on completing human text, which end up being able to do a surprisingly wide range of tasks.
What's driving this progress? A few different factors are scaling up exponentially:[1]
The total computing power applied to AI increases exponentially based on the first two points, and once you include software improvement, what you might call the “effective computing power” increases at an even faster exponential rate.
This growth compounds quickly. The computing power used to train the largest models in 2024 was billions of times greater than in 2010[2] — and that’s before taking into account better software.
As a result of this scaling, AI has become smarter. Various AI systems can now:
Scaling has also made some AI systems more general. A single language model like GPT-4o, which powers ChatGPT, can:
To get a sense of the capabilities of current language models, you can try them for yourself — you may notice that current freely-available systems are much better at reliably answering complex questions than anything that existed two or three years ago.
You can also see AI progress on quantitative benchmarks. AI has rapidly improved on measures of its ability to:
The “horizon length” of AI has also doubled every seven months.[9] That is: newer AI systems are increasingly able to remain coherent in their thinking while doing coding tasks, succeeding at new types of tasks that take humans longer and longer amounts of time.
In fact, researchers are struggling to keep up and create new benchmarks. One benchmark, called “Humanity’s Last Exam”[10], is a collection of problems from various fields that are hard even for experts. As of April 2025, AI progress on solving it has been only modest — although we haven’t checked in the past hour.
If progress is so fast, it’s natural to ask: will such trends take AI all the way to the human level?