The AI
Race

The trajectory visualized above represents the "Great Acceleration," an epoch definitively tracing the evolution of artificial intelligence from the publication of the Transformer architecture in 2017 to the maturation of autonomous reasoning agents in late 2025. This historical curve is not merely a record of parameter scaling, but a visualization of the collapse of cognitive barriers. It captures the distinct phases of the AI race: the Scale Era (2017–2022), dominated by the pursuit of raw parameter dominance which validated the scaling laws; the Productization Era (2023–2024), marked by the Cambrian explosion of commercial interfaces like ChatGPT and the crystallization of a potent open-source insurgency led by Meta’s Llama series, Mistral, and Alibaba’s Qwen; and finally, the Reasoning Era (2025).

The graph highlights pivotal inflection points, such as the democratization of high-performance inference via the LLaMA leak, and the emergence of "Test-Time Compute" in 2025 with models like DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI's o-series. These milestones signify the shift from static token prediction to dynamic, self-correcting logic chains—systems that "think" before they speak. Most strikingly, this era witnessed AlphaEvolve and similar reasoning agents generating solutions to previously open Erdős problems—mathematical challenges that had resisted human intellect for over 50 years. This trajectory maps humanity's transition from utilizing silicon tools to collaborating with digital agents capable of independent scientific discovery.