Discussion
12 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2026
amelius: Also nobody will ever have a moat, so the graph of investor stupidity is going through the roof.
aspenmartin: Of course they will. Tokens are valuable, you can always spend a finite budget on specialized tokens or fewer and higher quality tokens, size of user base and engagement gives you a flywheel moat that is difficult for newcomers to compete with. The market is complex and easy to oversimplify.
bryanrasmussen: My new startup tokencoin will blah blah blah exchange rate, (something AI writes here), 3. profit (more AI), benefiting all human kind and helping our users scale up their productive intelligence!
bix6: China’s robotics lead holy cow.
SilverElfin: Isn’t capital and momentum a moat? Sure Chinese models use distillation but I don’t see them training models from scratch. At least not today. But maybe as chips get cheaper and they have Chinese made ones?
ranger_danger: Don't they have ten times more people than the next highest country (Japan) though?
swiftcoder: > Isn’t capital and momentum a moat?Apparently not much of one. There are, what, 5 or more companies with frontier models? And open weights models like MiniMax are snapping at their heels
bossyTeacher: >Chinese models use distillation but I don’t see them training models from scratchMaybe because they don't have to. If someone is doing the heavy work and they can take output of that, it's a win for them.
xnx: The "China leads in robotics" seems to be unaffected by AI. The China line is basically on the same trajectory since 2012. The chart does no belong in the article.
Nevermark: There are many markets where open source has been nipping at heels for a long time.Obviously product areas differ for reasons structural and happenstance. But there is definitely a pattern that occurs, where open source fast follows commercial advances, benefiting from having a clear target to develop for.Which is of course, a great service. Even if it never unseats the commercial version, it forces the owners to reinvest more in improvements, by undermining their moats. As well as providing a much better value alternative version for many people.
HelloMcFly: Besides the lead in robotics for China, those Grok emissions charts are the thing that most leap off the page.
xnx: "These estimates should be interpreted with caution. In the case of Grok, they rely heavily on inferred inputs drawn from public reporting"That chart doesn't really pass the sniff test.
jazzypants: I don't know if I would want to do too much sniffing around the Methane power they are using over at xAI.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/03/elon-musk-xa...
themafia: Profits generated by AI: <not graphed>The absence speaks volumes.
