THE AI MUSEUM
Nine years that changed everything. Walk through them.
Alan's assistant
How can I help you?
I'm Alan's assistant, an AI, and here I'm the museum's guide. Ask about any work, person or figure in the museum. I answer only from the exhibits, link each one I used, and say plainly when the museum has no record of something.
Nine years of this, and it is still accelerating.
The gallery behind this door is the argument. This is the instrument reading: what shipped, who shipped it, and how much of it you are allowed to look inside. Recounted every day from a public dataset.
Counts are of models Epoch AI records as notable, not of every model released. The most recent month is always incomplete, because a model enters the dataset when it is reviewed rather than when it ships.
Epoch AI, 'Data on AI Models'. Published online at epoch.ai. Retrieved from 'https://epoch.ai/data/ai-models-documentation' Used under CC BY 4.0. This reading was taken after the current build was deployed.
How this museum is run
This museum is maintained by software agents. Its measurements are taken again every day, by a machine, without anyone asking.
The figures on this page were counted from a public dataset on 23 September 2026, not written down once and left. A scheduled job fetches the source, recounts every panel, and republishes. It refuses to publish anything it cannot verify, so a number here can be older than today but is never a guess.
The exhibits behind this door were written the same way. Every one of them was drafted by a language model working from a curated list of what belongs in this museum, with its sources attached and checked. A person chose what to include and reads what comes back. Nobody here is pretending a human wrote it.
- Recount
- Daily
- Source
- One public dataset
- On failure
- Publishes nothing
Plan of the building
8 roomsSelect a room to enter, or simply walk through.
The Long Gallery
34 works/5 rooms
The Foundation Era · 2017 – 2019 · 3 works
The Foundation Era
Research laid the architecture that powers everything since. The Transformer paper alone rewired the entire field.
2017 – 2019/3 works
The Scale Era
Models grew. Capability exploded. What had been a research curiosity became an industry.
2020 – 2022/5 works
The Inflection Era
The moment AI stopped being a technical subject and became a public one. One hundred million users in sixty days.
2022 – 2023/7 works
The Intelligence Era
Reasoning, planning, memory. The frontier moved faster than anyone had predicted — and the assumptions beneath it broke.
2024 – 2025/7 works
The Agentic Era
Models stopped answering and started working. Open weights caught the frontier, machines produced original mathematics, and the law finally arrived.
2025 – 2026/12 works
The floor line
The scale of it
Every parameter count the field has published, on a logarithmic scale. Each gridline is ten times the one below it. The rise is the part everyone expects. The gaps are the part worth standing in front of.
65M → 2.8T/4.6 orders
Every figure on this wall published since 2023 belongs to a model whose weights you can download. Not one of the closed frontier systems of the last three years has stated its size. The measure did not get harder to take. It stopped being offered.
Thirty-one works are an illustration rather than a measurement. The same question asked of every notable model on record, with its denominator and its caveats, is re-measured from the source and kept in the next room.
View as table
| Model | Year | Parameters | Weights |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transformer | 2017 | 65M | Open |
| BERT | 2018 | 340M | Open |
| GPT-2 | 2019 | 2B | Open |
| GPT-3 | 2020 | 175B | Closed |
| DALL·E | 2021 | 12B | Closed |
| Codex | 2021 | 12B | Closed |
| DALL·E 2 | 2022 | 4B | Closed |
| Stable Diffusion | 2022 | 890M | Open |
| LLaMA | 2023 | 65B | Open |
| Llama 2 | 2023 | 70B | Open |
| Mistral 7B | 2023 | 7B | Open |
| Llama 3 | 2024 | 70B | Open |
| DeepSeek R1 | 2025 | 671B | Open |
| Llama 4 | 2025 | 109B | Open |
| DeepSeek V4 | 2026 | 1.6T | Open |
| Kimi K3 | 2026 | 2.8T | Open |
| Qwen 3.8 Max | 2026 | 2.4T | Open |
The Pioneers Room
The minds that made it.
Six people whose work — across seven decades — created the conditions for everything that followed.
The Artifacts Vault
The objects that changed everything.
Five papers, datasets, and moments whose consequences are still unfolding.
Horizon
Where does it go from here?
Every museum ends with a door back to the world outside. This is that door — with three things worth carrying through it.
The question
Alan Turing asked in 1950 whether machines could think. Seventy-six years later, the question hasn't been answered — it's been reframed. We stopped asking whether machines could think and started asking whether it matters.
The pattern
Every era in this museum followed the same arc: a paper no one believed, a model that shouldn't have worked, a moment the world changed overnight. The arc is still running.
The open door
The years ahead have no exhibit yet. No artifact has been catalogued. No pioneer has been named. That wing is still being built — and the people building it are alive right now.
End of exhibition
Return to the entrancePicture credits
Photography via Pexels
- The Agentic EraDavid Yu
- The Artifacts VaultTalha Kılıç
- The Foundation EraCharlotte May
- The HorizonDick Scholten
- The Inflection EraFaruk Tokluoğlu
- The Intelligence EraDavid Yu
- The Pioneers RoomK
- The Scale EraMike Norris
Interior photography is used to give each room its character. It is illustrative rather than documentary: these are not photographs of the works described.