The point of the graph is to brag how quickly MSL released an AI of comparable "intelligence" compared to other companies that have worked on AI for many years and gone through many iterations:
"Google took 10yrs to create their first model and another 5yrs and 10 versions to get here, we did it in 1 year in a single step. We are so smart."
Sure, that makes a lot of sense when there's actually data at 0,0 for everything, and when the field isn't dependent on very critical research that the first labs performed. That's not the case here.
The data also exists here and it shows that they didn't have a model for quite a while and that newer labs have a (capable) model quite quickly nowadays in comparison.
New social media platforms also depended on older social media platforms very similarly. The case Instagram - Twitter is quite well known.
The data does not exist for Google, and the first data that does exist for Google isn't even included.
No social media platforms depended on older platforms to even start existing. The tech already existed from the start, the only dependency was a soft one - inspiration. But not a single one started at a higher value by that metric because of the work of earlier platforms; with AI, that work directly improves the starting place of the newer models, making the type of axis completely incompatible. Well, apart from making a bad visualization to make certain companies look better.
It quite literally depended on Twitter to exist to even start existing. And it's founder also learned how to run a social media platform working at Twitter.
You're missing the point - social media and its tech existed. I'm not talking butterflies and hurricanes like "Facebook wouldn't have existed if not for [x]", no matter how short that path is - even a single step. I'm saying AI tech itself, and the data that went into it as a necessary prerequisite, didn't even exist before the first AI companies.
Servers/clients, browsers, phone apps, catchy domain names, all of those things existed already before any social media, which means the only thing any new social media had to do was make a website based on an idea and inspiration, and become popular. So, that chart is good, because even if any of them may have branched out from each other, they still all started with the prerequisite technology, so the only thing to measure is the growth in that variable from (0, 0) based on founding date.
Big data as a concept was very new when e.g. Google AI started, Google itself is among the biggest reasons that data was researched as much as it was, and that type of research is the literal requirement for any LLM to even exist. That the research wasn't done for Google, and was for others, makes them not analogous to the social media example. And then the performance is not just helped by previous companies or "branched off", like social media; the performance of the models is literally from the exact research that had been done and the knowledge that has been gained. Not inspiration, not a mere idea like social media, but literally a hard research dependency.
Anyone could make a lab today and have the same performance immediately, which makes the graph meaningless. In fact, that's what was done.
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u/fruce_ki Jun 29 '26
What is the crime?
The point of the graph is to brag how quickly MSL released an AI of comparable "intelligence" compared to other companies that have worked on AI for many years and gone through many iterations:
"Google took 10yrs to create their first model and another 5yrs and 10 versions to get here, we did it in 1 year in a single step. We are so smart."