Companion view
As of June 6, 2026The AI Shockwave Timeline.
The handful of moments that changed the rules of AI — and what each one set in motion.
Most AI news is incremental. This view tracks the exceptions: the shocks that reset what people assumed was possible — how cheap intelligence could get, how much a model could reason, or where the real bottleneck moved. Each one shows a simple before and after, and a click opens the full story. Refreshed with the weekly industry update.
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
How to read this
Each marker is a moment that changed what people thought AI could do.
Bigger ripple = bigger shift. The number under it is the headline change.
Color = type of change (cost, reasoning, context, openness, plumbing). Shape = layer.
Click any marker for the plain-English story: before, after, and what it triggered.
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. As of June 6, 2026; reviewed and refreshed with each weekly industry update.
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.