Companion view
The AI Shockwave Timeline.
The events that reset frontier assumptions — and the impact each one sent through the stack.
The LLM Evolutionary Tree explains where models came from. This view tracks the shocks: the moments that bent the curve on cost per useful token, reasoning at inference time, or where the bottleneck lives. Each shock carries a before-to-after delta, grouped by archetype and tagged by layer — hardware, software, networking. Click any shock to watch its impact ripple downstream.
Frontier deltas, 2024 → 2026
Context window
Gemini 1.5 → DeepSeek-V4
Reasoning · AIME 2024
GPT-4o → o1 → DeepSeek-R1
Inference token cost
Blackwell → Rubin (reported)
KV cache footprint
DeepSeek-V2 → V4 @1M
15
Shocks
9
High-magnitude
5
Archetypes
2024-02 → 2026-05
Span
Click a shock to trace its downstream impact
Methodology.
- A shock resets an assumption. Inclusion requires that an event materially changed capability per unit of compute, reasoning at inference time, or where the system bottleneck lives — not merely that it topped a benchmark.
- Impact as before → after. Every shock carries one to three deltas across capability, economics, and systems, with exactly one headline. Improvements read green; the arrow shows whether the metric went up or down.
- Five archetypes, three layers. Color encodes archetype (efficiency, reasoning, context, open-frontier, interoperability); node shape encodes layer (hardware, software, networking); ripple size encodes magnitude.
- Reported metrics, labeled. Figures are official vendor-reported numbers unless independently reproduced. Forward-dated or preview items carry lower confidence.
- Curated, not exhaustive. The timeline captures the largest cross-layer inflection points defensible with primary English-language sources. Last updated 2026-05-29.
AI-readable exports.
Companions
The LLM Evolutionary Tree.
Where the models came from — lineage of frontier and open-weight families.
The AI Market Reference Architecture.
How market power moves through the layer cake — leaders, control points, and metrics.
Reset. Ripple. Repeat.