Chart of 28 historic projects shows Apollo was a massive outlier in spend and manpower vs GPT-4
NathanpmYoung · x · 2026-11-04
Ben Goldhaber and Damon Binder charted researcher-years and total 2025-dollar spending across 28 historic projects in science, engineering, and AI.
Key takeaways:
- The Apollo Program is a huge outlier: 400,000 researcher-years and over $100B, dwarfing the Manhattan Project and Space Shuttle.
- GPT-4 and DeepSeek-V3 look remarkably small and fast: roughly a year of effort, with GPT-4 around $100M+ and DeepSeek-V3 far less.
- Big science efforts like LIGO, LHC, the Human Genome Project, and EUV lithography sit in the 1,000–10,000 researcher-year, multi-billion-to-$10B range.
- AlphaFold 2, insulin, and Fermat's Last Theorem represent small-team, high-output outliers.
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