AI History Project
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The Model Size Explosion

From 1 parameter to 1.76 trillion — how AI models grew 1,760,000,000,000× in 65 years. A logarithmic journey through the exponential growth of artificial intelligence.

Neural Net
CNN
Transformer
LLM
Built for aihistoryproject.org — To understand where AI is going, start with where it began.Sources: Epoch AI · Stanford AI Index · Original papers
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AI Careers in Motion

How 25 personalities moved across universities, labs, and companies — revealing the hidden network behind AI's biggest breakthroughs.

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1980s1990s2000s2010s2020sNowGeoffrey HintonCarnegie …University of TorontoGoogle BrainIndependentJensen HuangOregon St…LSI Logic / AMDNVIDIAYann LeCunSorbonne …AT&T Bell LabsNew York UniversityMeta AI (FAIR)Yoshua BengioMcGill Un…University of Montreal…Jeff DeanCarnegie …DEC Resea…GoogleAndrew NgCarnegie …UC BerkeleyStanford UniversityBaiduLanding AI / DeepLearn…Demis HassabisUniversit…Lionhead / Elixir StudiosUniversit…DeepMindFei-Fei LiPrinceton…CaltechStanford UniversityDavid SilverUniversit…Elixir St…Universit…DeepMindShane LeggIDSIA (Sw…Universit…DeepMindDario AmodeiStanford …Princeton…D.E. Shaw…OpenAIAnthropicSam AltmanLooptY CombinatorOpenAIMustafa SuleymanDeepMindGoogleIlya SutskeverUniversity of TorontoGoogle BrainOpenAIAndrej KarpathyUniversit…Stanford …TeslaEureka LabsAlex KrizhevskyUniversity of TorontoGoogleIndependentDaniela AmodeiStripeOpenAIAnthropicMira MuratiDartmouth…Goldman S…OpenAIIan GoodfellowUniversit…AppleDeepMindAshish VaswaniColumbia …Google BrainEssential AIJohn SchulmanUC BerkeleyOpenAIClement DelangueVarious s…Hugging FaceAlec RadfordOpenAIArthur MenschENS / InriaGoogle De…Mistral AIAidan GomezUniversit…Cohere
Organization Groups
Academic(23)
Google / DeepMind(14)
OpenAI(9)
Anthropic(3)
Meta(1)
Microsoft(1)
NVIDIA(1)
Tesla(2)
Other Industry(9)
Startups / Independent(15)
Key Patterns
The Hinton Tree
1 professor → 3 revolutions
Sutskever (OpenAI/SSI), Krizhevsky (AlexNet), LeCun (Meta) all trained under Hinton at Toronto.
The OpenAI Diaspora
6 senior exits
Sutskever → SSI, Amodeis → Anthropic, Schulman → Anthropic, Karpathy → Eureka, Murati → startup.
Google as Finishing School
14 of 25 passed through
More than half of AI's top figures worked at Google/Brain/DeepMind at some point.
University of Toronto
The #1 AI feeder
Hinton, LeCun, Sutskever, Karpathy, Krizhevsky, Gomez — one department, six world-changers.
Built for aihistoryproject.org — To understand where AI is going, start with where it began.Click any name to explore · Hover to highlight connections