Exponential Tracker

A graph-first atlas of exponential curves: transistor counts, the cost of a genome, the price of orbit.

55 curves in 9 categories. Sources & Methodology · Guided Tours · Changelog

Computing

Moore’s Law — Fifty-five years of doubling, and the lead has changed hands twice.
HDD Cost Collapse — The price of keeping bits around, down ~8 billion-fold in real terms.
Cost per GFLOPS — The invisible curve behind simulation, graphics, science, and AI.
TOP500 #1 Systems — A public scoreboard for the fastest machines humans can assemble.
Server Work per Watt — More work from the same watt: 21.3× since 2009, in two long climbs and two stalls.
Consumer GPU FP32 Performance — Single-precision throughput, the metric that tracks real architectural improvement, not just transistor count.
Datacenter GPU AI Compute — Vendor headline training throughput per GPU, quoted in each generation’s own number format.
Quantum Processor Qubits — From 2-qubit lab demos in 1998 to 6,100-qubit arrays today: physical qubits compound, but useful logical qubits are still double-digit.

Biology

Genome Sequencing Cost — $95 million to $525, then it stalled. The famous $200 and $80 genomes count consumables only.
GenBank Sequence Data — The public sequence archive that the Human Genome Project filled and BLAST searches.
Protein Structures: Cumulative — Fifty years of lab work built 185,392 structures; one AlphaFold release added 214 million.
Cryo-EM Map Archive: Cumulative — The resolution revolution, counted: 8 released map entries in 2002, 52,921 by the end of 2025.
Gene Synthesis Cost — The write side of biology: genes fell ~1,250× to 2017, then the cost simply stalled.
World Cereal Yield — The Green Revolution in one line: 3.11× the grain per hectare since 1961, and never exponential.

Energy

Solar PV Cost — Solar modules fell about 500-fold in real terms, and reversed more than once on the way down.
Battery Cell Cost — Lithium-ion cells fell 99% in real terms, the engine under the EV.
Global Solar Installed Capacity — From backyard experiment to the fastest-growing energy source in history.
Haitz’s Law: LED Lumens per Dollar — The Moore’s Law of lighting: ~10× per decade in lumens per dollar, half that after 2014.
UK Cost of Light — The fuel cost of a fixed quantity of light fell 13,800-fold from 1300; the last half-century is almost flat.
Global EV Sales — From a niche curiosity to over 20 million per year: the transport revolution in numbers.
Grid Battery Storage — The missing piece of the renewable grid: cumulative deployed capacity going near-vertical.
Global Wind Power Capacity — The other half of the renewable transition: onshore and offshore, scaling 76× since 2000.
Fusion Energy Gain — The best energy gain any fusion experiment has achieved: past scientific breakeven in 2022, and setting records almost yearly since.

AI

AI Training Compute — The biggest training run ever done, doubling every five and a half months.
Cost of o1-Level Reasoning — Frontier reasoning cost 150× less within nineteen months of arriving.
AI Math Reasoning (Mock AIME) — Competition mathematics: from under 1% to 100% in three years.
FrontierMath — Unpublished problems, vetted by mathematicians: eighteen of the 285 are left.
AI Autonomy Horizon (METR) — How long a human-expert task can an AI complete alone? Doubling every ~6 months for 7 years.
SWE-bench Verified — Real GitHub issues, attempted with no human in the loop; the score is the share fixed.
HuggingFace Models — Public ML models hosted on HuggingFace: the "GitHub for AI" curve no closed lab can capture.
Open-Weight AI Frontier — The best model anyone can download, 5.3 points behind the closed frontier when it landed.
ChatGPT Weekly Users — From 1 million users in five days to a billion a week: among the fastest consumer-technology adoptions ever measured.

Connectivity

Internet Adoption — From 10 million to 6.05 billion, an S-curve whose fastest years are behind it.
Global Mobile Subscriptions — More mobile subscriptions than people on Earth: the fastest infrastructure rollout in history.
International Internet Bandwidth — The lit capacity carrying the world’s internet traffic between countries.
The Price of a Megabit — Wholesale bandwidth, from $1,200 a megabit in a 1998 survey to 17 cents in a 2025 filing.
Global Mobile Data Traffic — Traffic to phones more than tripled in five years, and video is most of it.
Ethernet Speed Standards — From 10 Mbps to 800 Gbps: the IEEE standard that quietly scaled 80,000×.

Space

Cost per kg to LEO — The cheapest ride to orbit barely improved for forty-three years, then Falcon 9.
Active Satellites in Orbit — From a handful of Cold War probes to nearly 16,800 active satellites, most of them launched in the last five years.
Annual Mass to Orbit — Mass launched each year multiplied eightfold in seven years, mostly Starlink.
Orbital Launches per Year — Between 55 and 130 a year for four decades. Then 2020 happened.
Confirmed Exoplanets — From 2 to over 6,000 worlds beyond our solar system, most found in the last 15 years.
Known NEAs, Roughly 1 km+ — The hunt for the asteroids that could end civilisation is more than 90% finished.

Knowledge

arXiv Preprints — From 306 papers in 1991 to 284,000 a year: the speed of open scientific publishing.
Total GitHub Repositories — From a private beta in 2008 to over 630 million repositories: the shared codebase of civilisation.
Annual Biomedical Papers (PubMed) — Three papers per minute, every minute, year-round. The publishing curve underneath every clinical decision.
English Wikipedia Articles — An exponential that is visibly running out of new things to write about.
Data Created per Year — Everything created, captured, copied, and consumed in a year: 2 zettabytes in 2010, 64 by 2020, a forecast 181 for 2025.

Robotics

Industrial Robots in Operation — Roughly 6× since 2000: 4.66 million metal arms in factories worldwide.
Surgical Robot Procedures — From 136,000 procedures a year to over 3 million: robotic surgery becomes routine.
Zipline Drone Deliveries — One operator went from 20,000 deliveries to two and a half million in under seven years.
Waymo Paid Robotaxi Rides — Annual fully driverless public rides, taken from Waymo’s own year-in-review counts.

Economy

World GDP — Two thousand years of economic output on one axis: near-flat for eighteen centuries, then vertical.
GDP per Capita — Eighteen hundred years stuck near $1,100 per person, then a breakout: 14× since 1820.

The atlas itself — the charts, the overlays, the guided tours — is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every curve above is a page of its own with its full data table.