waitbutwhy's classic AI explosion chart: from 'monkey tricks' to 'The fuck??'
pickover · x · 2026-10-23
Tim Urban's (waitbutwhy) classic "AI Explained" chart recirculates: AI intelligence climbs exponentially past ant, bird, chimp levels and then blows through both the "dumb human" and "Einstein" lines.
The punchline is the two stick figures — one laughs "that's adorable, the funny robot can do monkey tricks" just before the crossing, the other reacts "The fuck??" right after — a vivid illustration of how intelligence explosion defies human prediction.
More from AGI Musings
- Building agents is commoditizing: domain know-how and tooling are what matter now — dotey · 2026-10-23
- The ChatGPT Moment for Robotics: Autonomous Vehicles to Hit ~16M by 2026 — Rewkang · 2026-10-23
- Can models be literally insane? A Reddit thought experiment on accidentally psychopathic AI — rapPayne · 2026-10-23
- UnHerd essay: AI doomerism's proposed controls would be dystopian surveillance — DrTechlash · 2026-10-23
- Benjamin Bratton interview: rethinking human intelligence and agency — bratton · 2026-10-23
- A Claude-generated table of AI doom factors sparks debate on intuition vs knowledge — alexisgallagher · 2026-10-23