About AI Obituaries
AI Obituaries is a curated archive tracking declarations that "AI is dead," "overhyped," or "doomed to fail." We visualize these claims against real AI progress metrics to provide historical context for recurring skepticism.
The Visualization
Each point on the timeline represents a published claim doubting AI capabilities, predicting market collapse, or dismissing progress. The background trend lines show actual AI progress data from Epoch AI, including:
- Training Compute — Maximum FLOP used to train frontier models (exponential growth)
- MMLU Score — Benchmark accuracy tracking capability improvements
- Epoch Capability Index — Composite score tracking overall AI capability
Categories
- Capability Doubt — Claims AI cannot do specific tasks
- Market/Bubble — Predictions that AI is overhyped or a bubble
- AGI Skepticism — Claims AGI is impossible or very far away
- Dismissive Framing — Casual dismissal or mockery of AI progress
Data Sources
Progress metrics are sourced from Epoch AI, a research organization tracking AI development. Obituary claims are manually curated from published articles, interviews, and social media.
This project is not intended to mock individuals, but to provide historical perspective on the recurring nature of AI skepticism and the often-surprising pace of progress.