Bigger than COVID? The graphic that explains why AI will be so huge

Artificial intelligence is becoming very good and very fast. Whether it’s music, text, code or images, the time when it was reliably possible to tell the difference between AI and human results is disappearing at an alarming rate.

But for all their magic, AIs can also be pretty useless. They make things up and misunderstand instructions. They are brilliant as toys, but incompetent as assistants.

All of this makes it difficult to know how to express it AI put in the right light. Is it the most important technology trend since the iPhone? Or since the Industrial Revolution? It’s hard to tell from this distance.

There are industry standards, so-called benchmarks, for evaluating the intelligence of AI models. These also show rapid improvement.

When Google released Gemini 3, its latest AI upgrade, last week, it broke records across the board.

But benchmarks are too narrow to provide completely reliable indications of skills and potential.

This is why, says Marc Warner, you need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture…