Have We Seen an Acceleration in Discoveries?
Q: How much has discovery accelerated? LLMs have shown the ability to make novel discoveries across many domains. How much has this affected the aggregate discovery rate? In the figures below we plot all the data sources we can find, and make some very loose observations: Discovery of cyber vulnerabilities has accelerated sharply. Discovery of math results has accelerated somewhat. However this is harder to objectively measure. Discovery of optimizations has not shown a dramatic acceleration. These conclusions are based only on public discoveries. It is quite plausible that AI labs are making discoveries internally that they are not disclosing. Thanks. Thanks to Greg Burnham for extremely helpful comments. Overview We are just looking for slope changes. AI-assisted discoveries are often announced, but their significance is hard to assess. Here we look for slope changes in various metrics of discovery to see if we can detect an acceleration. For concreteness, we highlight January 2026 as a potential breakpoint at which the effects of AI might become observable. Some data sources record whether a discovery was AI-assisted or AI-contributed, but our primary focus is overall acceleration. We use the word “discovery” to refer to any advance in the state of public knowledge, including new inventions or rewriting algorithms to be more efficient. Monitoring aggregate discoveries is useful because it reflects real-world utility. Additionally aggregate discoveries can reflect either A…
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