2023-03 → Present
The AI takeoff is happening.
We're measuring it.
Future Shock maps the accelerating trajectory of artificial intelligence — across models, compute, robotics, research, and open source. Updated daily. No hype. No financial advice. Just the signal.
Six Tracking Axes
The dimensions of accelerationModel Capability
Benchmarks, multimodal, agents, context windows, tool use
Compute & Chips
GPU releases, FLOPs/dollar, training clusters, energy
Robotics
Humanoid milestones, autonomous deployments, LLM-driven demos
Research Velocity
arXiv publication rate, breakthrough papers, citation velocity
Open Source
GitHub commit velocity, AI co-authored code, framework growth
Policy
Government action, regulation, defense, trade, AI governance
Latest Signals
Updated dailyPoolside Releases Laguna S 2.1, an Open-Weight Agentic Coding Model Punching Above Its Weight Class on SWE-Bench Multilingual
Poolside has released Laguna S 2.1, a 118B open-weight Mixture-of-Experts coding model with 8B active parameters per token and a 1M-token context. It matches or beats models several times its size on agentic coding benchmarks, ships under OpenMDW-1.1, and runs on a single NVIDIA DGX Spark. The post Poolside Releases Laguna S 2.1, an Open-Weight Agentic Coding Model Punching Above Its Weight Class on SWE-Bench Multilingual appeared first on MarkTechPost .
Chinese AI models account for ~60% of token usage by US companies on OpenRouter, making restrictions harder to impose without disrupting US users and businesses (Nectar Gan/Bloomberg)
Nectar Gan / Bloomberg : Chinese AI models account for ~60% of token usage by US companies on OpenRouter, making restrictions harder to impose without disrupting US users and businesses — The rapidly increasing global competitiveness of China's artificial intelligence models is ringing alarm bells in Washington …
Sources: Reddit, Politico, and others mull cutting Google's access to their content for AI as traffic drops; Reddit signed a $60M/year deal with Google in 2024 (Alexandra Bruell/Wall Street Journal)
Alexandra Bruell / Wall Street Journal : Sources: Reddit, Politico, and others mull cutting Google's access to their content for AI as traffic drops; Reddit signed a $60M/year deal with Google in 2024 — Reddit, Politico and others are weighing how—or even if—they can work with the tech company as AI tools supplant traditional searches
EU Finalizes AI Disclosure Rules as Watermarking Mandate Outpaces Technology
EU Finalizes AI Disclosure Rules as Watermarking Mandate Outpaces Technology Home Tech Artificial Intelligence EU Finalizes AI Disclosure Rules as Watermarking Mandate Outpaces Technology Commission finalizes disclosure rules as experts warn no single AI watermarking tool meets the legal standard By Clayton Lewis Published: Jul 21 2026, 10:57 AM EDT Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share on Flipboard Share on Pocket TechTimes Illustrator The European Commissio [Search snippet: The European Commission published its final guidance on AI transparency requirements <strong>July 20, 2026</strong> — one day ago — giving every company that runs a chatbot, generates AI images, or publishes AI-written content for EU audiences 11 days to ...]
Exclusive: Applied Intuition wants to turn robotics into child’s play
Applied Intuition wants to turn robotics into child’s play | Semafor Intelligence for the New World Economy Semafor World Economy Exclusive / Applied Intuition wants to turn robotics into child’s play Reed Albergotti Tech Editor, Semafor Jul 21, 2026, 6:00am EDT Jul 21, 2026, 6:00am EDT Technology Share Applied Intuition Post Email Whatsapp Copy link Sign up for Semafor Technology: What’s next in the new era of tech. Read it now . Email address Sign Up In this article: The Scoop Step Back Know M [Search snippet: In a demo, <strong>an Applied Intuition product manager typed casual requests into a chat window: “Show me a segment set.”</strong> The system pulled up camera footage from the company’s data-collection cars in Stuttgart, Tokyo and San Francisco, with ...]
Expenditure Horizon: Measuring Optimization Ability, with an Application to NanoGPT - METR
Expenditure Horizon: Measuring Optimization Ability, with an Application to NanoGPT - METR Our Work Research Notes Updates Risk Assessment About Donate Careers Search --> Our Work Research Notes Updates Risk Assessment About Donate Careers Menu × Expenditure Horizon: Measuring Optimization Ability, with an Application to NanoGPT CONTRIBUTORS Tom Cunningham , Manish Shetty , Vincent Cheng , and Nate Rush DATE July 21, 2026 SHARE Copy Link Citation BibTeX Citation × @misc { metr-2026-e
Featured Essays
Durable Future Shock pieces from the newsletter archive: agent coordination, AI infrastructure, security, and the systems around the models.
Work
The K-Curve
The widening gap between people who compound value from AI and those who tried it once and bounced.
Open source
The Quantization Underground
How a four-line experiment changed the way small AI models are compressed and run locally.
Coordination
We Made AI Agents Negotiate the End of the World
The same model behaved differently depending on which other agents were in the room.
Agents
The (Missing) Layer Between You and Your Agents
What is missing between the agents doing the work and the person trying to understand what happened.
Infrastructure
The Grid Under the Cloud
The next decade of AI will be shaped by the places that can power, cool, permit, and physically host it.
Accountability
Promise Nothing, Claim Everything
Six competing AI companies arrived at remarkably similar terms for warranties, liability, and training data.
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