Kardashev index
0.725
Based on primary energy power · Type I = 1
AccelerationFour-dimensional view9 years ago
2017-06-12
The Transformer
The attention architecture lets models process sequences more efficiently and becomes the technical foundation of later large language models; it is not yet a chat assistant for the general public.
Art style · Contemporary realistic technology illustration
Origin of Life on EarthDinosaurs and MammalsAI Agents
Arrow keys step through pictures · Wheel to zoom · Drag or click to select time
Civilization metrics
Each sparkline shows the documented history of a metric on a logarithmic time axis. The dot marks the selected moment.
7.66Bpeople
1/1 of today
1.8×10¹³W
1/1 of today
1.8×10¹⁰floating-point operations per second per dollar (FLOP/s per $, nominal dollars)
1/5 of today
0.03 seconds
Comparable to today
39,897km/h
Comparable to today
Near this moment
The eight closest milestones. Select a title to jump there.
AlphaGo defeats one of the world's top Go players 4–1. Source
Mobike launches in Shanghai: scan a code to unlock and return a bike, no docking station needed. Source
The world's first quantum science satellite launches and achieves satellite-to-ground quantum key distribution. Source
A short-video app lets ordinary people shoot, share and scroll through videos. Source
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope is completed, the world's largest single-dish radio telescope. Source
The paper "Attention Is All You Need" introduces the Transformer architecture. Source
The most powerful operational rocket makes its first flight, and its two side boosters land in sync. Source
OpenAI pretrains a language model on unlabeled text, then fine-tunes it for specific tasks. Source
Capabilities
Acquired92 / 121 items
Recently acquired
Not yet available
Scenes across eras
Each era illustrated in its own style.
Every timeline entry cites its source. Metrics interpolate logarithmically between sourced data points. Forecasts include institutional and community views, and attributed site scenarios; years are not guaranteed realization dates. Illustrations are AI-generated in each era's style.