Musk Shares AI Progress Chart Calling It a Supersonic Tsunami
Elon Musk shared a chart showing that AI progress is nearly flat from mid-2023 to July 2026, followed by a sharp rise in 2026, referring to AI as a supersonic tsunami.
The chart marks November 2024 as the low point labeled "it’s so over," after which capability or computing power metrics are expected to experience a hockey stick-style explosion. Musk has previously mentioned that AI improves by about 10 times each year, claiming this pace will continue, potentially leading to a cumulative increase of 10,000 times over four years.
This is Musk's public statement on the acceleration curve of AI, with funding and computing power continuously flowing into cutting-edge model training. The integration of xAI and SpaceX engineering data benefits from accelerated iteration, while traditional software and knowledge work sectors face pressure from expectations of capability leaps.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Musk has long emphasized the exponential progress of AI, with market concerns about the slowdown of the scaling law corresponding to the low point on the chart at the end of 2024. The rapid improvement of the Grok series and industry benchmarks in 2026 is used as visual evidence to materialize his previous verbal prediction of "10 times every year."
On the capital front, SpaceX engineering data and self-developed training stacks are injected into Grok, forming a proprietary physical world data flywheel. The motivation is to convert real-world trial and error into model weights, shortening the cycle from experimentation to deployment, while also supporting Tesla's FSD and robotics development.
Similar to the acceleration phase in the later stages of Moore's Law or the actual landing phase after the internet bubble, AI is currently at a turning point from laboratory benchmarks to breakthroughs in real engineering capabilities.
Essentially, this represents a technological substitution: the capability curve shifts from linear perception to exponential explosion, with the mechanism being the combination of computing power, data, and algorithms breaking through the previous plateau.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- The most frightening aspect of the exponential curve is that it appears very flat.
- Consensus at the low point is often the starting point for acceleration.
- Four years of 10 times multiplication is not 40 times, but 10,000 times.