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Graphs that explain the state of AI in 2026
- amelius 6mo agoAlso nobody will ever have a moat, so the graph of investor stupidity is going through the roof.
- aspenmartin 6mo agoOf course they will. Tokens are valuable, you can always spend a finite budget on specialized tokens or fewer and higher quality tokens, size of user base and engagement gives you a flywheel moat that is difficult for newcomers to compete with. The market is complex and easy to oversimplify.
- bryanrasmussen 6mo agoMy new startup tokencoin will blah blah blah exchange rate, (something AI writes here), 3. profit (more AI), benefiting all human kind and helping our users scale up their productive intelligence!
- bryanlarsen 6mo agoIt's hard and complex to enter any mature market. The vast majority of firms that attempt to enter a new market fail. LLM's have no more than this normal moat.
- aspenmartin 6mo agoWell yes that’s my point: AI does not suddenly do away with the market.
- bryanlarsen 6mo agoIf every market has a moat, then saying that a particular market has a moat is a statement without meaning. The OP was probably not trying to make a meaningless statement, therefore the OP was probably saying that LLM's don't have an abnormally effective moat. I agree, LLM's don't have an abnormally effective moat, just the standard moat most mature markets have due to market complexity. IOW, LLM's will likely end up with the standard oligopoly most modern western markets end up in, which have minor but relatively ineffective pricing power.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- SilverElfin 6mo agoIsn’t capital and momentum a moat? Sure Chinese models use distillation but I don’t see them training models from scratch. At least not today. But maybe as chips get cheaper and they have Chinese made ones?
- swiftcoder 6mo ago> Isn’t capital and momentum a moat? Apparently not much of one. There are, what, 5 or more companies with frontier models? And open weights models like MiniMax are snapping at their heels
- SilverElfin 6mo agoI’m not technically familiar but I remember someone saying that models like MiniMax basically skip the cost of training by using distillation to basically “steal” the models from OpenAI or Anthropic, and that these companies now have various defenses against this. What happens when MiniMax has to do the full work themselves?
- lelanthran 6mo agoWhy would they have to do it themselves?
- Nevermark 6mo agoThere are many markets where open source has been nipping at heels for a long time. Obviously product areas differ for reasons structural and happenstance. But there is definitely a pattern that occurs, where open source fast follows commercial advances, benefiting from having a clear target to develop for. Which is of course, a great service. Even if it never unseats the commercial version, it forces the owners to reinvest more in improvements, by undermining their moats. As well as providing a much better value alternative version for many people.
- amelius 6mo agoAnd it does not even consider that e.g. the EU might one day decide that AI should be for everyone, thus releasing a heavily subsidized open source model. Or that at some point AI is good enough, and so at that point any model will do.
- hydrocomplete 6mo agoI still don't understand the State of AI in 2026.
- bix6 6mo agoChina’s robotics lead holy cow.
- bauerd 6mo ago[dead]
- alex43578 6mo agoChina’s manufacturing lead in a graph
- ranger_danger 6mo agoDon't they have ten times more people than the next highest country (Japan) though?
- xnx 6mo agoIt striking, but says nothing about AI.
- krona 6mo agoThe graph says "new industrial robots installed", which is a bit misleading. For example the newest BYD factories are still stuffed with German/Japanese robots.
- Teever 6mo agoWhat's worse is that this the predictable result of a choice that America made decades ago and continues to make. Outsourcing manufacturing capacity to China and letting domestic manufacturing skills atrophy and institutional knowledge die out was a choice that many people opposed but were ultimately helpless to stop because the people making the decisions ignored them and did it anyways for personal gain is how we got here. You'd think that the supply chain shocks that we saw during COVID would be a wake up call that would have jolted people into action. You'd think that Ukraine-Russia war would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action. You'd think that the recent failures by the US military in Iran and the depletion of years of missile stockpiles would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action. I'm at a loss to explain it. It's like the American oligarchs want to weaken America, or at least are willing to do so if it means that they have greater control over it. Maybe they don't care about manufacturing capacity because they know that America is ultimately a nuclear protected island and that even if things continue to decline they'll be safe to rule it like a king?
- cloud-oak 6mo ago> Training AI models can generate enormous carbon emissions Sure, but what I'd really like to see is a graph for how much carbon is generated serving these models globally.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- HelloMcFly 6mo agoBesides the lead in robotics for China, those Grok emissions charts are the thing that most leap off the page.
- xnx 6mo ago"These estimates should be interpreted with caution. In the case of Grok, they rely heavily on inferred inputs drawn from public reporting" That chart doesn't really pass the sniff test.
- jazzypants 6mo agoI don't know if I would want to do too much sniffing around the Methane power they are using over at xAI. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/03/elon-musk-xai-pollution-memphis https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/03/elon-musk-xa...
- xnx 6mo agoThat's definitely a very visible use of carbon generating fuel, but I'd choose methane over coal power plants all day.
- jazzypants 6mo agoI agree 100% if those are the only two options. I guess my point is that it's fair to assume that Elon's crew is doing the bare minimum in terms of efficiency and pollutant mitigation-- at least when compared to other data centers who do legally compliant business with real power companies.
- HelloMcFly 6mo agoThe rest of the quote you began continues: "On the other hand, Perrault noted that 'Epoch AI independently estimates Grok 4’s emissions to be significantly higher at approximately 140,000 tons of CO₂.'" I realize these are still estimates, but when the other independent analysis nearly doubles the outcome I'm not left feeling optimistic. One could argue some numbers from others are underestimates... which of course just bums me out all the more!
- xnx 6mo agoThe "China leads in robotics" seems to be unaffected by AI. The China line is basically on the same trajectory since 2012. The chart does no belong in the article.
- eddyzh 6mo agoWhile chatGPT was not out then, the ML that drives robotics was acting by then very much.
- fyrn_ 6mo agoWorth calling out AI sentiment among young people is not nearly so rosy: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skepticism-climbs.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...
- BerislavLopac 6mo agoThat's temporary. They will adapt and find ways to use it to its full potential - just like it happened with every new technological shift in history.
- free_bip 6mo agoWould you mind asking your crystal ball some other questions - like what those ways of using it are exactly?
- whateveracct 6mo agodon't the young usually pick up new tech faster?
- bigbugbag 6mo agoreally no: https://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ https://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-compu...
- roetlich 6mo agoMy Firefox doesn't accept your https cert. Maybe check that out?
- gnabgib 6mo agoThere isn't a cert.. https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=coding2learn.org https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=coding2learn.... archive.today suggests, there's never been (The only https returns 403 in 2015, the 2013 links are http) https://archive.is/https://coding2learn.org/ https://archive.is/https://coding2learn.org/ The domain has been mentioned on HN before (without TLS), this account seems to be just messing up the links (replace https with http to see the page)
- themafia 6mo agoProfits generated by AI: <not graphed> The absence speaks volumes.
- johnnienaked 6mo agoThere hasn't been one dollar of profit from any company, it's more a battle of how low you can keep your losses
- ChrisArchitect 6mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758028 Source: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report
- eulgro 6mo ago> The report estimates that carbon emissions from models with the least efficient inference are over 10 times as high as those with the most efficient inference. DeepSeek’s V3 models were estimated to consume around 23 watts when responding to a “medium-length” prompt, while Claude 4 Opus was estimated to consume about 5 watts. This makes absolutely no sense. I suppose they meant watt hours, and that's a weird way to explain carbon emissions...
- i_love_retros 6mo agoStating "Software engineers are all-in on AI" because of an increase in github projects being created is hilarious. I didn't realise creating a github repo made someone a software engineer. If only I had known this I wouldn't have bothered learning all the other stuff!
- gregsadetsky 6mo agoI agree with you on that metric being not great - I would have definitely swapped it for this: "Claude Code GitHub Commits Over Time" https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inflection-point https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inf... Sure - also an imperfect metric. But less imperfect? And more indicative of... something? Not nothing?
- tqi 6mo ago> The report estimates that training the latest frontier large language models, such as xAI’s Grok 4, can generate over 72,000 tons of carbon-equivalent emissions. That seems pretty trivial, relative to 38bn per year globally?
- jeffbee 6mo agoYeah it's basically nothing despite the fact that xAI seemed to intentionally crank up the carbon intensity for no reason. Also, hilarious to select 2 major models from 2025 and they're both Grok, almost certainly the least useful, least used, and least interesting of that year.
- azakai 6mo agoAnother way to put it: if training a model cost 72,000 tons of carbon, and it then gets used by 100 million people (typical of major models), the cost per person is 0.00072 tons. Per the article, the average human uses over 5 tons per year (Americans: 18). Adding 0.00072 to 5 is not really noticeable. (There is also the cost of inference, of course.)
- idoubtit 6mo agoThe training of one LLM requires as much emissions as 17,000 people over a year. Which, according to the article, is 8 times more than last year, and may be underestimated by a factor 2. That does not cover the whole usage: the hardware, the bots that collect learning data, the prompts, etc. And there are now many models of this size, and thousands and thousands at smaller sizes. And some of this parameters are increasing. AI is estimated to emit more than 80e6 tons of CO2-equivalent this year. Much more than whole countries like Austria or Israel. Is that trivial?
- _aavaa_ 6mo agoHow much does that come out to per user or per request? And how does that compare to anything else those people do? Like drive 10 minutes. Or eat a burger. These numbers keep being put up as large in absolute terms but that’s deceiving for the average person who doesn’t have a way to compare them to something relevant in their lives.
- illiac786 6mo ago> The capabilities of AI models have improved with incredible speed over the past decade, and as the graph above shows, progress seems to be accelerating. errr… no? Every discipline is clearly hitting a plateau so far. Some started recently and hence haven’t yet (competition maths) but based on past graph, they will all plateau.