The breakneck speed of AI
I've analysed the 172 releases by all major AI labs over the past 6 years and The flood is here. 64 frontier releases in the last 12 months alone — more than all of 2020–2023 combined.
This is every frontier AI release from 2020 to April 2026 — 172 launches from 26 labs — plotted on a single timeline. The story it tells in 60 seconds:
▸ The cadence collapsed. Gap between releases at the same lab fell from 250 days (2020–22) to 50 days (2025–26). A 5× speedup. ▸ The split is real. 76 of 92 closed-weight frontier models came from US/UK labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI). China's open-weight releases (DeepSeek, Qwen, Moonshot, Zhipu) outnumber its closed ones 2 to 1. ▸ The curve bent. From ~3 releases per quarter in 2020 to ~3 releases per week in 2026. ▸ The flood is here. 64 frontier releases in the last 12 months alone — more than all of 2020–2023 combined.
No analyst, no procurement team, no researcher reads 1.2 frontier launches every week. That is what "impossible to keep pace" looks like, measured.
