Maker & MachinehAIstory · special section
hAIstory · The Race to AGI
The Transformer (2017) was the inflection. OpenAI scaled it up. Anthropic broke off over how fast was too fast. The industry now competes for compute, electricity, and data — and most of the people building it think AGI lands between 2027 and 2032.
Latest from the wire
deal · Aug 17, 2026
NVIDIA / SB Energy / OpenAI. NVIDIA secured land, power, and shell at SB Energy's PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, Ohio, to exclusively host NVIDIA AI compute. OpenAI is the tenant; NVIDIA is investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy. Read the article →
release · Aug 13, 2026
Google DeepMind. Google introduced Gemini 3.7 Flash, its workhorse model for coding and agents, at an introductory $0.75 / $3.75 per million input/output tokens through the end of 2026. Read the article →
release · Aug 11, 2026
Cursor / SpaceXAI. Grok Bot launched in beta: AI teammates with their own cloud computers, sold through Cursor Ultra and SuperGrok Heavy. Access widened August 21. Read the article →
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Era 1 · 1950 – 2011
When AI was a dream, then a disappointment, then a dream again. Universities held the power. Funding came and went. The neural network was invented, dismissed, and quietly kept alive by a handful of believers.
Era 2 · 2012 – 2017
Neural networks suddenly start working — not because of new ideas, but because GPUs got fast enough to run the old ones. Big Tech wakes up and starts buying.
Era 3 · 2018 – 2022
Transformer + huge data + huge GPUs = something nobody predicted. The first models that felt unsettlingly close to human language. Big Tech and OpenAI dominate. The big money starts moving.
Era 4 · Late 2022 – 2023
AI stops being for researchers and becomes a household word. 100 million users in two months. Every CEO in the world calls an emergency meeting about AI strategy.
Era 5 · 2018 – present
Two labs, founded by people who used to work together, now define the frontier. The Microsoft–OpenAI vs. Amazon–Anthropic structural rivalry crystallizes. Every model launch is a counter-punch.
Era 6 · 2023 – 2026
The race isn't two horses — it's a stampede. China enters the frontier. NVIDIA becomes the most valuable company on Earth. Electricity becomes the new oil.
Who actually controlled AI — not just which model shipped.
1950 – 2005
AI lived in CS departments. MIT, Stanford, CMU, Toronto. Funded by DARPA, the NSF, and patient grants. The work was slow, public, and academic.
2010 – 2018
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu hire entire university labs. AlexNet wins ImageNet → industry sweeps in. DeepMind acquired. Brain, FAIR, MSR run the show. Universities become the farm system.
2018 – 2022
GPT-2/3 prove scale wins. Microsoft's $1B locks OpenAI in. AWS, GCP, Azure become the only places frontier models can be trained. The cloud is now the lab.
2023 – 2026
NVIDIA at $5T. H100/Blackwell allocation is a strategic asset. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, DeepSeek own the frontier. Whoever has the GPUs and the talent runs the show.
The next 5 years
When compute is commoditized and models are shared, the moat moves to electricity and physical-world embodiment. Whoever can power and embody AGI first defines the next industrial era. Nuclear deals, fab buildouts, and humanoid platforms become the new arms race.
| When | OpenAI | Anthropic |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-03 | GPT-4 | Claude 1 |
| 2023-07 | — | Claude 2 (public) |
| 2023-11 | GPT-4 Turbo (128K context) | Claude 2.1 (200K context) |
| 2024-03 | — | Claude 3 (Haiku / Sonnet / Opus) |
| 2024-05 | GPT-4o (text+image+audio+video) | — |
| 2024-06 | — | Claude 3.5 Sonnet (beats Opus) |
| 2024-09 | o1 — first reasoning model | — |
| 2024-10 | — | Claude 3.5 Haiku + Computer Use |
| 2024-11 | — | MCP open-sourced (industry standard) |
| 2024-12 | o3 + Sora public | — |
| 2025-02 | GPT-4.5 (Orion) | Claude 3.7 + Claude Code |
| 2025-05 | — | Claude 4 (Sonnet 4, Opus 4) |
| 2025-08 | GPT-5 | — |
| 2025-09 | — | Claude 4.5 (first to break 80% on SWE-bench) |
| 2025-11 | GPT-5.1 (Instant / Thinking) | — |
| 2025-12 | GPT-5.2 | — |
| 2026-02 | GPT-5.3-Codex | Claude 4.6 (Opus + Sonnet) |
| 2026-04 | GPT-5.5 | Claude Opus 4.7 |
| 2026-06 | — | Fable 5 |
Click a lab to isolate its track.
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
CEO, OpenAI
CEO, Anthropic
CEO, Google DeepMind
2025–26
Agentic AI in production. Reasoning models become standard.
2026–27
First serious AI scientific discoveries. Real coding autonomy.
2027–30
Plausible window for AGI (general human-level AI).
2030–35
Plausible window for superintelligence (AI beyond humans).
Nuclear restarts, grid buildout. May be the real bottleneck.
NVIDIA, TSMC, geopolitics around Taiwan.
The "data wall" — synthetic data is the bet.
$100B+ training runs, trillion-dollar infrastructure.
EU AI Act, US executive orders, China policy.