Axis of Ordinary

“It’s just hype.” [2012] AlexNet demolishes the ImageNet benchmark and launches the modern deep-learning era. Skeptics: “It can label pictures. Cute.” [2016] AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol and plays Move 37—a move experts initially consider a mistake, then recognize as creative. Skeptics: “Board games. Narrow AI.” [2020] AlphaFold predicts protein structures with near-experimental accuracy, transforming a 50-year scientific problem. Skeptics: “Still narrow.” [2022] ChatGPT puts a general-purpose model that can write, code, explain, translate, and analyze into the hands of the public. It reaches 100 million users in two months. Skeptics: “A stochastic parrot with excellent marketing.” [2024] Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry recognize foundational neural-network research and AlphaFold. Skeptics: “Prestigious hype.” [2025] General-purpose models from Google and OpenAI reach gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Skeptics: “Benchmarks don’t count.” [2026] Waymo passes 220 million fully autonomous miles. An independent study finds 68% fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than for human drivers in the same cities. Skeptics: “A geofenced demo.” [2026] Claude finds—and human experts validate—more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities in heavily tested open-source software, including bugs missed for decades. Skeptics: “Autocomplete with a debugger.” [2026] Google’s AI Co-Scientist proposes biological hypotheses that subsequently survive laboratory experiments. Skeptics: “Not real discovery.” [2026] An OpenAI model disproves an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture. Another produces a proof of the 50-year-old Cycle Double Cover Conjecture. Claude helps refute the 87-year-old Jacobian Conjecture. Harmonic’s Aristotle autonomously discovers and formally verifies solutions to eight open group-theory problems. Skeptics: “Okay, but apart from vision, games, language, programming, chemistry, biology, cybersecurity, autonomous driving, and original mathematics—where is the progress?” AI researchers: “We think these systems will become much more capable.” Skeptics: “There they go with the hype again.”