The open frontier

421 advances that are emerging now or still ahead, ordered by how close they are (deploying → demonstrated → early → not yet attempted).

• ChatGPT 2022 · frontier
  Nov 2022: fastest-adopted consumer app to that point.
• Reasoning models 2024 · frontier
  o1 (2024), followed by DeepSeek-R1 and others.
• AI agents 2025 · frontier
  Agentic coding and computer-use systems, 2024–25.
• AI gigawatt datacenters 2025 · frontier
  Multi-GW AI clusters and energy as the binding constraint.
• AI for science 2024 · frontier
  AI-driven materials, math, and lab discovery (GNoME 2023, AlphaProof 2024).
• NVIDIA H100 2022 · frontier
  Hopper with the Transformer Engine (FP8); it trained the frontier-model generation.
• AI datacenter buildout 2024 · frontier
  Hyperscaler capex of hundreds of billions per year; gigawatt campuses.
• FPV drone warfare 2022 · frontier
  Mass cheap drones in Ukraine, 2022 onward.
• First CRISPR therapy (Casgevy) 2023 · frontier
  Approved for sickle-cell disease, Dec 2023.
• Open-weight frontier models 2023 · frontier
  Llama 2023, DeepSeek, Qwen.
• Humanoid robots 2024 · frontier
  Figure, Tesla Optimus, Unitree, and others enter pilot deployments.
• Fusion ignition 2022 · frontier
  NIF achieves net target gain, Dec 2022.
• Quantum computing (error correction) 2024 · frontier
  Below-threshold error correction (Google Willow), 2024.
• AI theorem proving 2024 · frontier
  AlphaProof: IMO silver level, 2024; gold-level LLMs in 2025.
• Autonomous weapons 2024 · frontier
  AI-targeted loitering munitions and swarms.
• Starship 2023 · frontier
  First integrated flight 2023; booster catch 2024.
• First in vivo prime editing in a human (Wilson's disease) 2026 · frontier
  Prime Medicine dosed the first patient in a trial that rewrites DNA directly in liver cells.
• NVIDIA Blackwell 2024 · frontier
  A two-die package; GB200 NVL72 racks.
• AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (200M structures) 2022 · frontier
  Predicted structures for nearly all known proteins.
• Gold-medal level at IMO 2025 (Gemini Deep Think, OpenAI) 2025 · frontier
  35/42 in natural language; DeepMind officially certified.
• Erdős unit distance conjecture disproved by AI 2026 · frontier
  OpenAI general reasoning model constructed n^(1+δ) unit-distance configurations; externally verified (May 20, 2026).
• OpenAI math batch: 721 manuscripts / 373 families / 17 fields (openai/math) (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Current catalog 721 manuscripts / 373 result families across 17 fields (released Oct 6 as 722 / 372). Internal frontier model; drawn from an evaluation of ~4,000 problems; ~3 h ChatGPT-Pro-equivalent compute per result. Not Erdos problems or a benchmark: research manuscripts across 17 fields (number theory, algebraic geometry, PDE, TCS...) claiming results such as Milne's rationality conjecture, BSD in Selmer coranks 0/1, Hilbert 10 over Q, Kobayashi canonical ampleness, Brennan, Nagata. Oct 7: 3 withdrawn (sign error, incl. a "rational Hodge conjecture for products of K3 surfaces" paper), 14 revised; catalog now 721 manuscripts / 373 families (Oct 26). ~300 of 719 formalized in Lean per OpenAI (Zenodo audit could not reproduce that count); OpenAI says ~50% released unconfirmed. Overlap with human work exists (exact overlaps conjecture, solved concurrently by Kogler); no source gives a total of already-known results.
• Diffusion image models 2022 · frontier
  Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, Midjourney, 2022.
• AI chip export controls 2022 · frontier
  US export controls on advanced chips, Oct 2022.
• Small modular reactors 2023 · frontier
  NuScale design certified 2023; hyperscaler nuclear deals 2024.
• AI materials discovery 2023 · frontier
  DeepMind GNoME predicts 2.2M crystals, 2023.
• Brain-computer interfaces 2024 · frontier
  Neuralink first human implant, Jan 2024.
• AI-designed drugs 2023 · frontier
  First AI-discovered drugs enter Phase 2.
• World models and video generation 2024 · frontier
  Sora, Genie: simulated worlds.
• Google Willow below-threshold error correction 2024 · frontier
  Logical error falls as the surface code grows, Dec 2024.
• Tirzepatide 2022 · frontier
  A dual GIP/GLP-1 agonist.
• Virtual cell foundation models 2025 · frontier
  AI models trained on hundreds of millions of single cells that predict how a cell responds to a gene edit or a drug: Arc Institute's State model and Virtual Cell Challenge (2025), CZI and Biohub's Billion Cells Project, and Tahoe's perturbation atlases.
• Starship booster tower catch 2024 · frontier
  Oct 13, 2024 (Flight 5): Mechazilla caught a Super Heavy booster.
• Starship Block 3 reaches orbit 2026 · frontier
  Flight 14 (Sept 28, 2026): first orbital flight, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites; the Block 3 debut was May 2026.
• CRISPR cure for sickle cell (Casgevy approval) 2023 · frontier
  UK (Nov 2023) and FDA (Dec 2023).
• High-NA EUV 2024 · frontier
  ASML EXE:5000 shipped to Intel (2023–24).
• US chip export controls 2022 · frontier
  The Oct 2022 BIS rules on advanced AI chips and tools; tightened in 2023–25.
• CoWoS for AI accelerators at scale 2023 · frontier
  Packaging capacity became the H100 supply constraint.
• Solar overtakes nuclear in global electricity generation (H1 2026) 2026 · frontier
  Ember data: solar ~1,564 TWh vs nuclear ~1,326 TWh in Jan-Jun 2026, just over 10% of world power; reported by BBC Future Oct 23.
• EU AI Act 2024 · frontier
  Regulation (EU) 2024/1689: prohibits some practices (Art. 5, e.g. social scoring and manipulative AI) and requires human oversight of high-risk systems (Art. 14). Binds providers and deployers, not machines.
• AlphaEvolve improves its own AI stack 2025 · frontier
  The Gemini-powered evolutionary coding agent sped up a key kernel in Gemini's own training, recovered data-center compute through better scheduling, and contributed to chip design: AI improving its own stack.
• AlphaFold 3 2024 · frontier
  Joint structures of proteins, DNA, RNA, and ligands (Nature, May 2024).
• AlphaProof + AlphaGeometry 2: IMO silver 2024 · frontier
  28/42 at IMO 2024, with formal Lean proofs.
• AlphaEvolve: 4×4 complex matrix mult in 48, kissing number 593 (11D) 2025 · frontier
  Improved 14 matrix multiplication targets and ~20% of 50+ open constructions.
• Navier–Stokes: claimed forced finite-time blow-up (OpenAI) (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  OpenAI internal model claims finite-time blow-up for Navier-Stokes with a smooth external force (Clay alternatives C/D); Lean 4 formalization (paper/Lean mismatch disputed, arXiv 2610.08144); unforced problem remains open; not peer reviewed; Clay (Sep 11) says apparently settled, prize process not started.
• KLS conjecture proved (human-directed AI) 2026 · frontier
  31-year-old Kannan–Lovász–Simonovits conjecture resolved with agentic AI exploration; independently validated and machine-checked.
• 3SUM/APSP hypotheses refuted by Claude-found algorithm (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Preprint (Alman & Vassilevska Williams) reports an AI-discovered algorithm refuting two core fine-grained complexity hypotheses.
• Hilbert's tenth problem over Q: negative answer (OpenAI) (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  OpenAI manuscript claims no algorithm decides rational solvability of integer polynomials.
• OpenAI: local smoothing conjecture proof, ETH disproof, QFT result (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  OpenAI released AI-produced results incl. a local smoothing proof and a Lean-formalized natural-language disproof of the Exponential Time Hypothesis.
• Classification of Finite Simple Groups fully formalized in Lean by AI agent swarm (Axiom) 2026 · frontier
  Dozens of AI agents directed by Axiom mathematicians produced a sorry-free ~43.1M-line Lean proof of the "Enormous Theorem" (15,000 pages, 500+ papers) in 24 days, surfacing 34 noteworthy deviations from the literature and a gap in a published route to the Unbalanced Group Theorem, repaired with a new argument.
• Perovskite and tandem solar 2023 · frontier
  Tandem cells above 33% efficiency.
• Enhanced geothermal 2023 · frontier
  Fervo's horizontal-drilling pilot, 2023.
• AI governance regimes 2024 · frontier
  EU AI Act 2024, safety institutes.
• Neutral-atom logical qubits 2023 · frontier
  Harvard/QuEra 48 logical qubits, Dec 2023.
• NIST post-quantum cryptography standards 2024 · frontier
  FIPS 203/204/205 published Aug 2024.
• Co-packaged optics 2025 · frontier
  NVIDIA Spectrum-X/Quantum-X photonics switches announced March 2025.
• Vision-language-action models 2023 · frontier
  Google RT-2 and successors map vision and language to robot actions.
• Genie 4 multimodal world model 2026 · frontier
  DeepMind's real-time interactive world simulator with generated audio and dialogue; trusted-tester preview.
• Cheongwang laser air-defense: live shootdown of 3 drones 2026 · frontier
  Hanwha's fielded laser weapon (~$1.50/shot claimed) and a 30 kW-class vehicle laser downed all three target drones in a ROK Army exercise.
• Starlink Mobile direct-to-cell reaches 11M VEON users 2026 · frontier
  11M+ unique users connected via satellite on ordinary LTE phones in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh within a year.
• Med-PaLM (LLM medical QA) 2022 · frontier
  Google: the first LLM to pass the USMLE threshold; Med-PaLM 2 scored about 86.5% (2023).
• AlphaMissense 2023 · frontier
  It classified 71 million missense variants.
• AI mammography screening (MASAI trial) 2023 · frontier
  A Swedish RCT: AI-supported screening cut radiologist workload 44% with no loss of detection.
• Ambient AI scribes at scale 2024 · frontier
  DAX Copilot and Abridge, rolled out across large systems (e.g. Kaiser Permanente, 2024).
• FDA-cleared AI medical devices pass 1,000 2025 · frontier
  The FDA's AI-enabled device list passed 1,000 entries, about 75% in radiology.
• Pig kidney xenotransplant (living patient) 2024 · frontier
  MGH, March 2024: a gene-edited pig kidney.
• Rentosertib (ISM001-055) phase 2a 2025 · frontier
  Insilico's AI-discovered target and molecule for IPF showed a lung-function signal (Nature Medicine, 2025).
• First personalized base-editing therapy (baby KJ) 2025 · frontier
  CHOP and Penn built a bespoke in vivo editor for CPS1 deficiency within months.
• New Glenn booster landing 2025 · frontier
  First orbital launch Jan 2025; the booster landed on a sea platform in Nov 2025.
• Chinese orbital booster recovery 2026 · frontier
  Long March 10B net recovery at sea (July 2026); LandSpace Zhuque-3 land landing (Aug 2026).
• Twice-yearly HIV PrEP (lenacapavir) 2025 · frontier
  FDA approved Yeztugo in June 2025.
• Backside power delivery 2024 · frontier
  Intel PowerVia (Intel 18A, 2025).
• CHIPS and Science Act 2022 · frontier
  $52.7B for US fabs and R&D.
• AI-enabled cyberattacks 2024 · frontier
  Microsoft and OpenAI (Feb 2024) documented state hacking groups using LLMs; Anthropic (Nov 2025) reported a largely AI-automated espionage campaign.
• AI-assisted bio/chemical weapon design uplift 2022 · frontier
  Urbina et al. (Nature Machine Intelligence, 2022): a drug-discovery model, inverted, proposed 40,000 toxic molecules, including VX-like agents, in under 6 hours.
• IBM l-couplers link two 120-qubit Nighthawk chips at 99% transfer fidelity 2026 · frontier
  Four 80 cm cryogenic links joined two full Nighthawk R1 processors: 99.0% avg state transfer, 94.75% avg distant CZ gate, simultaneous cross-module entanglement.
• China drafts AI export controls (23 technologies incl. frontier models, agents, chip design) 2026 · frontier
  Draft rules let foreigners use Chinese AI via cloud but require approval to transfer models, data, chip-design or datacenter tech; temporary registration already in force; adoption expected by year-end.
• AGM-183A ARRW hypersonic missile enters production ($694M) 2026 · frontier
  USAF awarded Lockheed Martin a production contract for the B-52-launched boost-glide weapon (Mach 5+), its first hypersonic missile to reach production; quantities undisclosed.
• OpenAI "automated research intern" goal met 2026 · frontier
  OpenAI reported that it reached its goal of a system that carries out multi-day research tasks under human direction, and is aiming for an automated AI researcher by March 2028.
• Neuralink VOICE speech BCI: ALS participant at 75 wpm, 5.8% WER in first week (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  First published speed/accuracy figures from Neuralink's VOICE early-feasibility trial (NCT07224256): one ALS participant decoded attempted speech to text and voice at 75 wpm on a 125k-word vocabulary; presented at NEALS 2026 by PI Nader Pouratian.
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold 2024 · frontier
  Hassabis and Jumper (with Baker) win the 2024 Chemistry Nobel.
• Deep RL controls tokamak plasma 2022 · frontier
  DeepMind and EPFL magnetic control of TCV plasma (Nature, Feb 2022).
• AlphaTensor matrix multiplication 2022 · frontier
  Discovered faster matrix multiplication algorithms, including 47 multiplications for 4×4 over GF(2) (Nature, Oct 2022).
• FunSearch cap set constructions 2023 · frontier
  LLM-guided search found larger cap sets in dimension 8 (Nature, Dec 2023).
• GNoME 2.2M new crystals 2023 · frontier
  Predicted 381k stable materials (Nature, Nov 2023).
• GraphCast weather forecasting 2023 · frontier
  ML 10-day forecasts outperforming HRES (Science, Nov 2023).
• AlphaGeometry 2024 · frontier
  Olympiad geometry at near-gold level (Nature, Jan 2024).
• AlphaProof Nexus: 9 Erdős problems, 44 OEIS conjectures 2026 · frontier
  Autonomous Lean-verified proofs (arXiv 2605.22763).
• 3D Ghys conjecture proved with Intern-S2 2026 · frontier
  Shanghai AI Lab model helped prove a 1995 dynamics conjecture; Peking University team formally verified it.
• Linear Hadwiger conjecture proved (GPT-6 Astra) (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Norin & Steiner preprint credits GPT-6 Astra with the proof.
• Brennan's conjecture proved by OpenAI; experts confirm and shorten 2026 · frontier
  OpenAI preprints proved Brennan's conjecture and disproved Kraetzer's t^2/4 conjecture; Binder, Ivrii, Prause and Smirnov validated it and published a much shorter proof of a stronger statement.
• Nagata conjecture: OpenAI proof under expert review (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  OpenAI released a proof that d > m*sqrt(r) for r >= 10 very general points in P^2; Tevelev's arXiv account explains it and notes it is not yet peer reviewed.
• Erdős–Hajnal property proved for all paths P_t (with GPT-6 Astra) (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Tung H. Nguyen (Oxford) credits GPT-6 Astra with key lemmas; a DeepMind internal model independently proved the P6 case with a Lean formalisation.
• OpenAI: finite-time blow-up for the unforced 3D incompressible Euler equations (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Companion result: smooth, compactly supported divergence-free initial velocity on R^3 whose unforced Euler solution develops a singularity in finite time; Lean 4 formalization in the same repo.
• Complete human genome (telomere-to-telomere) 2022 · frontier
  Complete set of nucleic acid sequence for humans. Publication of research reporting the sequencing of the remaining gap of the Human genome.
• 0DTE options boom 2022 · frontier
  Daily SPX expirations from 2022; about half of SPX volume by 2023.
• AI-generated content farms ("slop") 2023 · frontier
  Mass-produced low-quality AI content.
• Microsoft Majorana 1 topological chip 2025 · frontier
  Announced Feb 2025; topological qubit claims are disputed.
• Photonic AI accelerators 2025 · frontier
  Lightmatter's photonic processor (Nature, April 2025).
• Gate-all-around transistors 2022 · frontier
  Samsung 3nm GAA, 2022; TSMC N2 2025.
• China grants paid robotaxi demo permits to Xpeng and VW JV 2026 · frontier
  Guangzhou licence lets Xpeng carry paying passengers in driverless taxis, the step before commercial approval.
• First subsea geothermal well and net-positive seafloor power plant (Endurance Adélie) 2026 · frontier
  Seattle startup drilled the first offshore geothermal well at Axial Seamount and ran a 3-ton seafloor plant net-positive for ~8.7 s (peak 16.5 kW).
• General Fusion LM26 reaches 1 keV via magnetized target fusion 2026 · frontier
  LM26 exceeded 1 keV electron temperature with low-speed metal-wall compression, the first of three LM26 milestones (with UKAEA).
• Pentagon picks 4 directed-energy weapons for homeland counter-drone pilot 2026 · frontier
  JIATF-401 selected AeroVironment, Epirus Leonidas HPM, Kord Firefly and Boeing CLWS for a pilot at US bases.
• Schaeffler "humanoids making humanoids" factory, Taicang 2026 · frontier
  Six humanoids at five stations assemble actuators for next-gen humanoids; start of component mass production.
• AMIE diagnostic dialogue AI 2024 · frontier
  A Google research system that beat primary-care physicians on simulated consultations.
• Tesla Optimus 2022 · frontier
  Unveiled Sept 2022; still emerging.
• Telomere-to-telomere genome 2022 · frontier
  The first gapless human genome.
• Neuralink first human implant 2024 · frontier
  Jan 2024; patient Noland Arbaugh.
• Altos Labs 2022 · frontier
  Launched Jan 2022 with $3B for cellular rejuvenation.
• Deepfake fraud at scale 2024 · frontier
  Arup lost about $25M to a deepfaked video call in Hong Kong (Feb 2024).
• DOE conditional $5B loan for Constellation nuclear uprates (~1.1 GW) 2026 · frontier
  Conditional commitment to uprate and modernize eight plants in IL, MD and PA, adding nearly 1.1 GW; not yet a final loan.
• OpenAI GPT-6.1 Terra (computer-use model at half price) 2026 · frontier
  Faster, cheaper cross-app computer-use model; ~50% lower API price, +15 pts on Agents' Last Exam vs GPT-5.6 Terra, 50.3% Terminal-Bench 4.0 (self-reported).
• $63B SPV to buy Broadcom XPUs and lease them to Anthropic 2026 · frontier
  BofA, Citi and Morgan Stanley (first lien) and Blackstone (second lien) fund a vehicle that buys Broadcom accelerators and networking for lease to Anthropic; deliveries from 2027.
• US Treasury proposes expanded outbound investment rules (AI, chips, quantum, hypersonics, biotech) 2026 · frontier
  Implements the 2025 COINS Act: reporting or prohibition for US investment in sensitive tech in China and other countries of concern; covers AI incl. "superintelligence"; comment period before final rule.
• The AI Scientist (Sakana AI) 2024 · frontier
  An agent pipeline that generates ideas, runs experiments and writes ML papers end to end. Early and uneven, but a first open demonstration of automated research.
• Tahoe-100M perturbation atlas 2025 · frontier
  Tahoe Therapeutics released about 100 million single cells profiled under drug perturbations, the largest open perturbation dataset at release.
• US Section 232 proclamation: robotics and industrial machinery imports threaten national security 2026 · frontier
  Trump concurred with Commerce's finding that imports of robots (incl. humanoids, quadrupeds, AGVs), industrial machinery and parts impair national security; Commerce and USTR get 180 days to negotiate, with tariffs, quotas or incentives held in reserve.
• China's CXMT to start HBM3E production at 20-30% yields 2026 · frontier
  CXMT has sampled HBM3E to domestic AI chip designers and plans limited production within ~2 months despite 20-30% yields (SK Hynix ~70%); tested performance is closer to SK Hynix HBM3.
• AlphaDev faster sorting 2023 · frontier
  Faster sorting routines merged into LLVM libc++ (Nature, June 2023).
• GenCast probabilistic weather 2024 · frontier
  Beats ENS ensemble forecasts (Nature, Dec 2024).
• Erdős problem #728 resolved by AI + Lean (Aristotle) 2026 · frontier
  GPT-5.2 Pro proof repaired and Lean-verified by Harmonic's Aristotle.
• Explicit counterexample to Tsirelson's problem (AI + Lean) (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Binary linear system game with ~1.4M equations, found with GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 (Gao, Yu & Zhi).
• Golomb–Welch conjecture (perfect Lee codes) claimed, ChatGPT-assisted (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Chen, Huang and Luo claim Lee balls of radius >= 2 never tile Z^n for n >= 3, settling the ~1970 conjecture; ChatGPT helped explore strategies and check calculations.
• Qwen 2024 · frontier
  Artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Alibaba Cloud. Jun 2024 Alibaba Cloud 72B 3T tokens Various
• Biosensor 2022 · frontier
  Probe which tests for biological molecules. Scientists report the development of sensors to gather and identify DNA of animals from air (airborne eDNA).
• Artificial neuron 2022 · frontier
  Mathematical function conceived as a crude model.
• Paywall 2022 · frontier
  System that prevents Internet users from accessing webpage content without a paid subscription or fee. In a paywalled article, American scientists propose policy -based measures to reduce large risks from life sciences research – such as pandemics through accident or misapplication.
• Transplantation 1954 · frontier
  Moving of an organ or tissue from one body or body region to another. Success of record-long (3 days rather than usually <12 hours) of human transplant organ preservation with machine perfusion of a liver is reported.
• Cartilage 2022 · frontier
  Resilient and smooth elastic tissue, rubber-like padding that covers and protects the ends of long bones at the joints. Lab-made cartilage gel based on a synthetic hydrogel composite is found to have greater strength and wear resistance than natural cartilage, which could enable the durable resurfacing of damaged articulating joints.
• Preprint 2022 · frontier
  Version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. A preprint demonstrated how backdoors can be placed undetectably into classifying (e.g. posts as "spam" or well-visible "not spam") machine learning models which are often developed and/or trained by third parties.
• Spider silk 2023 · frontier
  Filament material produced by spiders. Researchers report a production method for spider silk fibers from gene-edited transgenic silkworms for a sustainable alternative material six times stronger than Kevlar.
• COVID-19 drug development 2023 · frontier
  Preventative and therapeutic medications for COVID-19 infection. The world's first COVID-19 drug designed by generative AI is approved for human use, with clinical trials expected to begin in China. The new drug, ISM3312, is developed by Insilico Medicine.
• Applications of artificial intelligence 2023 · frontier
  Applications of machine intelligence. A science writer provides an overview of "the nascent industry of AI-designed drugs ".
• Version control 1972 · frontier
  Activity of managing the versions of one or more files.
• Earth observation satellite 1972 · frontier
  Artificial satellite specifically designed to observe Earth from orbit. The first global, interactive AI- and satellite monitoring -based, map [ image needed ] and analysis of plastic waste sites to help prevention of plastic pollution, especially ocean pollution was published.
• Internet television 2022 · frontier
  Distribution of television content via the public Internet. News outlets reported that in July, for the first time, more people watched streaming TV than cable within the U.S. [ globalize ].
• Misinformation 2022 · frontier
  Incorrect information with or without an intention to deceive. A research report by NewsGuard indicated there is a high level of online misinformation delivered [ image needed ] – to a mainly young user base – with TikTok, whose usage is increasing.
• Artificial intelligence visual art 2022 · frontier
  Genre of art. Text-to-3D software became sophisticated, shortly after generative AI art. OpenAI released Point-E, a machine learning system that can generate 3D models from text prompts, similar to previously released GET3D and Magic3D by Nvidia.
• Dogfight 2023 · frontier
  Combat between aircraft, conducted at close range. A first successful autonomous long-duration operation, including simulated combat, of a modified F-16 fighter jet, X-62A, by two AI software was reported.
• Speech synthesis 1961 · frontier
  Artificial production of human speech. A text-to-speech synthesizer, VALL-E, that can be trained to mimic anybody's voice with just three seconds of voice data and may produce the most natural-sounding results to date, was reported in a preprint.
• Peremptory norm 2023 · frontier
  Compelling law (international) that cannot be derogated.
• Open hardware 2023 · frontier
  Hardware whose design documents are openly accessible to and modifiable by others. Notable innovations: a low-cost open source air pollution sensor (Flatburn), a laser-using drone-based methane plume localization method, and a portable EEG helmet with significant accuracy of decoding thought words to text (DeWave).
• Enshittification 2023 · frontier
  Systematic decline in quality of online platforms over time driven by greed. The concept of enshittification about the quality of content on social media platforms introduced in 2022 gained traction.
• Tor 2002 · frontier
  Daemon and utilities for an anonymizing network.
• Artificial Intelligence Act 2026 · frontier
  European Union regulation on artificial intelligence.
• GPT-4 2023 · frontier
  Family of artificial intelligence models developed by OpenAI. Model introduction GPT-4 OpenAI introduces GPT-4, describing it as a multimodal model capable of accepting text and image inputs and generating text outputs.
• Maglev 1984 · frontier
  System of train transportation that uses two sets of magnets. 2023 – The first test-runs of a superconducting maglev test line, called a hyperloop, are carried out in Datong, China (50 km/h of ~1,000 km/h).
• Analog AI chips 2023 · frontier
  IBM analog in-memory AI chip, Nature 2023.
• Implantable ultrasound drug-delivery device for glioblastoma 2026 · frontier
  MIT device releases drugs and uses ultrasound to spread them past the blood-brain barrier (mouse study).
• SQUID "bare loop" synthetic-area-spread sensor 2026 · frontier
  Adelaide team fixes zero-field detection in SQUID arrays without varied loop sizes (Phys. Rev. Applied).
• California SB 925 statewide fusion commercialization plan 2026 · frontier
  First US state law directing a fusion siting, permitting and commercialization strategy.
• NHTSA proposes AV-specific FMVSS 108 rules (cyan ADS lamps) 2026 · frontier
  Proposed rule rewrites lighting standards for driverless designs and standardizes optional cyan ADS indicator lamps.
• First ERCOT interconnection application for SMRs (Blue Energy, up to 1.5 GW) 2026 · frontier
  Up to five 300 MW GE Vernova Hitachi reactors proposed to power a Crusoe data center; first unit not before 2033.
• NASA revises Starship/Blue Moon lander plans for 2028 landings 2026 · frontier
  Starship HLS to dock with Orion in LEO and push it to low lunar orbit; NASA to pick first crewed lander by readiness.
• Anti-amyloid Alzheimer's antibodies (lecanemab) 2023 · frontier
  A modest slowing of decline.
• UN General Assembly resolution 78/241 on lethal autonomous weapons 2023 · frontier
  First UNGA resolution on lethal autonomous weapon systems (Dec 2023): asks the Secretary-General for a report on their humanitarian, legal, security and ethical challenges. No ban.
• Disinformation-for-Hire Firms (Team Jorge) 2023 · frontier
  Commercial contractors sell managed fake-avatar networks, hacking and fake news pages to sway elections for paying clients; Israel-based Team Jorge claimed more than 30 campaigns worldwide.
• AI-Generated Influence Operations 2024 · frontier
  Operations from Russia, China, Iran and an Israeli political firm used language models to mass-produce comments, articles and personas; OpenAI found none broke out to large authentic audiences.
• IIT vs GWT adversarial collaboration (Cogitate) 2023 · frontier
  Rival theorists pre-registered opposing predictions and tested them together; first results were announced in 2023 (published in Nature, 2025). Neither theory was fully vindicated.
• PsiQuantum 8x8 silicon-photonic optical circuit switch for AI data centers 2026 · frontier
  Spin-off from its quantum photonics platform: all-optical port-to-port switching with ~1.2 dB insertion loss, 40 dB crosstalk and <3 ms reconfiguration, no amplification; samples shipping, products planned.
• Erdős Sidon-set prize problem, LLM-formalized proof 2026 · frontier
  Counterexample {1,2,4,8,13}; Lean proof generated by ChatGPT (PNAS, May 2026).
• FrontierMath Erdős benchmark: 2/68 open problems solved 2026 · frontier
  A pre-release GPT-6 Astra resolved #74 and #126 under controlled conditions.
• Meta AI 2023 · frontier
  Artificial intelligence laboratory owned by Meta. Feb 2023 Meta AI 65B 1.4T 6300 Non-commercial research Facebook's license and distribution scheme restricted access to approved researchers, but the model weights were leaked and became widely available.
• Mixture of experts 1991 · frontier
  Machine learning technique. Apr 23 Tencent 295B Tencent Hy Community Mixture-of-experts model with 21B active parameters and a 256K-token context window. Preview predecessor to Hy3.
• Kimi 2023 · frontier
  Chatbot. Jul 8 Cognition AI Coding model for the Devin agent; trained from a Kimi K2.7 base with Cognition's reinforcement-learning pipeline. Available via Devin (not as open weights).
• GLM 2025 · frontier
  Large language model by Z.ai. Aug 14 Z.ai 744B 30T Various 40B active
• CAPSTONE 2022 · frontier
  NASA satellite to test and verify the calculated orbital stability planned for Lunar Gateway. US CAPSTONE Near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) of Moon Operational CAPSTONE, Lunar orbiting CubeSat that will test and verify the calculated orbital stability planned for the Gateway space station.
• XPoSat 2024 · frontier
  Indian space telescope. India XPoSat Earth Operational ISRO 's mission to study X-ray polarisation. Successfully launched on 1 January 2024 on a PSLV-DL launch vehicle.
• Electrocatalyst 2022 · frontier
  Catalyst participating in electrochemical or redox reactions.
• Necrobotics 2022 · frontier
  Practice of using biotic materials as robotic components. Researchers introduce the concept of necrobotics and demonstrate it by repurposing dead spiders as robotic grippers by activating their gripping arms via applying pressurized air.
• Ectogenesis 2022 · frontier
  Artificial growth of an organism. First report of Synthetic embryos grown exclusively from mouse embryonic stem cells, without sperm or eggs or a uterus, with natural-like development and some surviving until day 8.5 where early organogenesis, including formation of fo…
• Remote controlled animal 2022 · frontier
  Animals controlled remotely by humans. Researchers report the development of remote controlled cyborg cockroaches functional if moving to sunlight for recharging.
• Bio-printing 2022 · frontier
  Biomaterials 3D printing. First success of a clinical trial for a 3D bioprinted transplant, an external ear to treat microtia, that is made from the patient's own cells is reported.
• Microphyte 2022 · frontier
  Microscopic algae, typically found in freshwater and marine systems, living in both the water column and sediment. Nanoengineers report the development of biocompatible microalgae hybrid microrobots for active drug-delivery in the lungs and the gastrointestinal tract (GT).
• Biocomposite 2023 · frontier
  Composite material reinforced by natural fibers. Researchers report the development of a biocomposite 3D printing ink, BactoInk, containing calcium carbonate -producing microorganisms which could be used for restoration, artificial reefs and potentially bone-repair.
• Neuroenhancement 2023 · frontier
  Targeted enhancement and extension of cognition in the healthy. Researchers demonstrate functional integration [ broken anchor ] of a magnetically steered microbot containing neurons, 'Mag-Neurobot', in a mouse "organotypic hippocampal slice" ( OHS ) as physical (semi-)artificial neurons.
• Artificial gene synthesis 2023 · frontier
  Fully artificial DNA production method based on solid-phase DNA synthesis. In 10 studies, researchers of the Sc2.0 project report yeast with a half- synthetic genome.
• Working animal 2023 · frontier
  Domesticated animals for assisting people.
• Cryopreservation 2023 · frontier
  Process where cells, whole tissues, etc. are preserved by cooling to sub-zero temperatures. The first successful transplant of a functional cryopreserved mammalian kidney is reported. The study demonstrates a "nanowarming" technique for vitrification for up-to-100 days preservation of transplant organs.
• Cellular agriculture 2024 · frontier
  Production of agriculture products from cell cultures.
• Cell therapy 1968 · frontier
  Therapy in which cellular material is injected into a patient. Four cell therapy companies die.
• Open-source robotics 2022 · frontier
  Robotics developed with open-source hardware and free and open-source software, publicly sharing blueprints, schematics, and source code. A university reported the release of 'Quad-SDK' which may be the first open source full-stack software for large agile four-legged robots, compatible with the ROS. [ better source needed ]
• Agricultural robot 2022 · frontier
  Robot in agriculture. News outlets reported a novel agricultural robot for viable weed control using lasers [ image needed ] or "laserweeding". There are similar precision agriculture machines that have been reported before, also e.g.
• Autonomous underwater vehicle 2022 · frontier
  Untethered submersible manned or unmenned.
• Mobile security 2022 · frontier
  Safeguards and best practices against security attacks or exploits that target software vulnerabilities in mobile devices.
• Existential risk from artificial intelligence 2022 · frontier
  Hypothesis that artificial general intelligence could result in human extinction.
• Anti–money laundering 2022 · frontier
  Activities and regulations to prevent and detect money laundering. News outlets reported the first fully self-supervised anti–money laundering AI software using contemporary suboptimal datasets, LaundroGraph.
• Internet privacy 2022 · frontier
  Personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via Internet.
• Electronic skin 2022 · frontier
  Electronics mimicing skin functionalities. Researchers reported a robotic finger covered in a type of manufactured living human skin.
• 3 nm lithography process 2022 · frontier
  Semiconductor manufacturing processes with a 3 nm GAAFET technology node. Samsung announced the first mass production of computer chips using a 3 nm process.
• Neural radiance field 2020 · frontier
  3D reconstruction technique using machine-learning. A method for editing NeRF scenes, a novel media technique from 2020, with natural language commands was demonstrated by Nvidia.
• Text-to-image model 2022 · frontier
  Machine-learning model. A novel potentially significantly more efficient text-to-image approach, as implemented in MUSE, was reported.
• Generative design 2023 · frontier
  Form finding process that can mimic nature’s evolutionary approach to design. Software for generating 3D dynamic scenes ( text-to-4D ), MAV3D, was reported.
• Brain-reading 2023 · frontier
  Use of brain measurements, e.g., fMRI or EEG, to decode brain stimuli. Researchers demonstrated a non-invasive brain-reading method. It can translate a person's neural activity into a continuous stream of text using fMRI data and transformer machine learning.
• Wireless mesh network 2023 · frontier
  Radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. A two/multi-robot and beacons mesh communication paradigm for exploration by robotic probes, drones, spacecraft, disaster recovery rovers or underwater robots was reported.
• Bird intelligence 2023 · frontier
  Study of intelligence in birds. Researchers showed parrots can use and enjoy using a videocalling system.
• Traffic analysis 1914 · frontier
  Process of intercepting and examining messages. Researchers demonstrated how pre-installed apps on Android smartphones in China are used for mass surveillance in China.
• Dating app 2009 · frontier
  Online dating service presented through a mobile phone application.
• Brain implant 2023 · frontier
  Technological devices that connect directly to a biological subject's brain. Researchers demonstrated an open-brain surgery-free brain implant, Stentrode, that can record brain activity from a nearby blood vessel, showing it can be used to operate a computer.
• Artificial cell 2023 · frontier
  Engineered particle that mimics one or many functions of a biological cell. A study demonstrated functional integration of a magnetically steered microbot containing neurons, 'Mag-Neurobot', in a mouse " organotypic hippocampal slice " as physical (semi-) artificial neurons.
• Implant 2023 · frontier
  Medical device surgically installed in the body to replace, support, or enhance a biological structure. Researchers reported the development of a fuel cell implant powered by blood glucose. It can also release insulin at certain levels and have enough energy to allow smartphone implant control.
• Open-source artificial intelligence 2024 · frontier
  Concept of open applied to AI. Notable innovations: LAION releases a first version of BUD-E, a fully open source voice assistant, an automatic waste sorting system that can distinguish between over 500 waste categories is released, researchers describe an AI ecosyst…
• Optical storage 1958 · frontier
  Storage of data on a medium using marks in a pattern, which can be read back with the aid of light. Researchers describe an approach for an optical disk with petabit capacity,
• OpenAI o1 2024 · frontier
  2024 AI model from OpenAI. DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-R1 on 20 January, a large language model based on DeepSeek-V3 utilising a chain-of-thought process similar to OpenAI o1.
• 2025 RAM shortage 2025 · frontier
  Ongoing shortage of RAM and SSD. In November, a supply shortage in semiconductor memory begins, marked by significant price increases in consumer DRAM components.
• Gravitational wave background 2023 · frontier
  Random gravitational-wave signal potentially detectable by gravitational wave experiments. 2023 – Experimental evidence of stochastic gravitational wave background
• Neutrino astronomy 2023 · frontier
  Observational astronomy that benefits from the direct, or indirect, detection of neutrinos. 2023 – First "image" of the Milky Way in neutrinos instead of light
• Artificial photosynthesis 2022 · frontier
  Process of photosynthesis. 2022 – Researchers in Cambridge develop floating artificial leaves for light-driven hydrogen production. The lightweight, flexible devices are scalable and can float on water similar to lotus leaves.
• Mojo 2023 · frontier
  Programming language. Mojo Modular Python, Rust, Cython, C, C++, CUDA, Swift, Zig
• Spectrum (Isar Aerospace launcher) 2026 · frontier
  Two-stage small launch vehicle by Isar Aerospace. 2026 Isar Aerospace launches Spectrum, from Andøya Spaceport becoming the first successful flight from a private Launch provider in Northern Europe.
• Sleeping car 1857 · frontier
  Railway passenger wagon with private sleeping berths. 2023 – A comeback of sleeping trains in Europe is reported as demand for more comfortable travel modes than overnight buses and sustainable transport rises. A new generation of such trains is released.
• Respiratory syncytial virus vaccine 2023 · frontier
  Vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). 2023 – First respiratory syncytial virus vaccine
• Chikungunya vaccine 2023 · frontier
  Vaccine intended to provide acquired immunity against the chikungunya virus. 2023 – First vaccine for Chikungunya
• AGCO signs Agility Digit humanoid pilot (Kansas plant, 2027) 2026 · frontier
  Commercial agreement for Digit to sort, stack and place totes in AGCO's Hesston facility from 2027.
• AI-guided transgene-free crop editing pipeline (Biographica + Hudson River) 2026 · frontier
  AI gene-target ranking paired with transgene-free editing and regeneration, starting with tomatoes.
• GXO expands Agility Digit humanoids to two more US sites 2026 · frontier
  After 100,000+ tote moves in Georgia, Digit deployments extend to Statesville NC and Lebanon TN from early 2027.
• AI agent selects gene-therapy vector and performs stereotaxic injection in epileptic mouse (claimed) 2026 · frontier
  Exin Therapeutics (YC) says an AI agent chose among 19 vectors, computed brain coordinates from literature and drove a motorized rig to inject 250 nL into a mouse epilepsy model, with a veterinarian holding a kill switch; the mouse recovered.
• OpenAI withdraws 3 math manuscripts a day after release (sign error) 2026 · frontier
  Sign error in "Algebraicity of Weil classes on split abelian eightfolds" invalidated it and two dependents (Kuga–Satake for K3; rational Hodge for products of K3 surfaces).
• Media literacy 2022 · frontier
  Encompasses the practices that allow people to access, critically evaluate, and create media.
• Digital literacy 2023 · frontier
  An individual's ability to find, evaluate, and compose clear information from a digital source. Researchers reported ' digital resignation ', calling for regulations and education reform.
• Umbrella review 1990 · frontier
  Review of systematic reviews or meta-analyses.
• DESI 3D map of the universe 2024 · frontier
  Reconstruction. 2024 – The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) released a precise 3D map of the cosmos, providing evidence that dark energy, the force accelerating the universe's expansion, may be weakening over time, challenging the cosmologi…
• Mass education and numeracy · future · progress: deploying
  A population that can read, calculate and reason, and so can build, check and govern advanced technology.
• Verifiable AI hardware and confidential computing · future · progress: deploying
  Chips that attest what model they run and on what data. This is the hardware root of trust for AI governance and private voting.
• Atomic-resolution chemical imaging · future · progress: deploying
  Seeing every atom and bond in a working molecular system, the quality-control tool for atomically precise manufacturing.
• India Stack · future · progress: deploying
  Open digital identity, payments, and data rails that make public services instant and cheap.
• Global gigabit connectivity · future · progress: deploying
  Satellite and terrestrial networks bring every person online at broadband speed, the substrate for digital government and AI services.
• Terawatt-scale solar plus storage · future · progress: deploying
  Tandem solar cells and cheap batteries deployed at multi-terawatt scale. The near-term workhorse of abundance.
• Whole-brain connectome of a fly · future · progress: deploying
  Every neuron and synapse of an adult fruit-fly brain mapped (FlyWire, 2024), a first full wiring diagram of a complex brain.
• Engineered microbiome therapies · future · progress: deploying
  Designed gut and skin microbial communities that treat disease and support closed-loop life support.
• Continental HVDC and superconducting grids · future · progress: deploying
  Long-distance, low-loss transmission that moves sunlight across time zones and links every source to every load.
• Water abundance · future · progress: deploying
  Desalination and atmospheric water harvesting cheap enough that fresh water is never scarce.
• Universal real-time translation · future · progress: deploying
  Speech-to-speech translation across every language in real time, removing language as a barrier to deliberation.
• Rule of law and secure property and contracts · future · progress: demonstrated
  Courts that enforce contracts and protect property, for strangers and rulers alike. Without them, nobody funds a 20-year bet.
• Honest money and deep capital markets · future · progress: demonstrated
  Sound money and cheap, honest long-term credit that can fund moonshots. Historic usury bans were drift; so is predatory debt.
• Low corruption and institutional integrity · future · progress: demonstrated
  Public money and permits go where the rules say, so big programmes deliver instead of leaking.
• Long-horizon, stable governance · future · progress: demonstrated
  Institutions that can commit to and fund multi-decade programmes across elections and leadership changes.
• Open inquiry and free speech · future · progress: demonstrated
  The freedom to question, publish and be wrong in public: the engine of error correction.
• Talent mobility (high-skill immigration, brain circulation) · future · progress: demonstrated
  The best minds can move to where the work is and move back, so talent compounds instead of being wasted.
• Abundant, cheap energy · future · progress: demonstrated
  Energy per person is the root of every capability on this spire, from compute to desalination to launch.
• Deterrence and great-power peace · future · progress: demonstrated
  No great-power war, so capital and talent go into building instead of destroying.
• High-trust society · future · progress: demonstrated
  Strangers cooperate, contracts are cheap and institutions are believed, which makes ambitious collective projects possible.
• Zettascale AI compute · future · progress: demonstrated
  Training and inference clusters a thousand times larger than today's, built on next-node lithography, chiplets, and stacked memory. Nearly every other precursor draws on it.
• Fault-tolerant quantum computing at scale · future · progress: demonstrated
  Millions of physical qubits running error-corrected algorithms. It unlocks exact chemistry, materials design, and quantum simulation of physics.
• De novo designed protein machines · future · progress: demonstrated
  AI-designed proteins that act as motors, switches, and enzymes nature never evolved. These are the soft path to molecular machines.
• Fast permitting and clear, minimal regulation · future · progress: demonstrated
  Clear standards that create markets (like the shipping container) instead of open-ended review that adds drag.
• Formally verified AI-written software · future · progress: demonstrated
  AI writes proofs alongside code, so critical software (grids, reactors, governments, implants) is provably correct.
• Programmable DNA nanomachines · future · progress: demonstrated
  DNA origami and DNA walkers that position molecules with nanometre precision. This is a working toolkit for building at the molecular scale.
• General-purpose humanoid workforce · future · progress: demonstrated
  Robots that learn any manual task from demonstration and work safely beside people.
• Synthetic molecular motors · future · progress: demonstrated
  Chemist-designed rotors, shuttles, and switches (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016), the first artificial molecular machines.
• Human-level dexterous robot hands · future · progress: demonstrated
  Robot hands that manipulate anything a human can, the gap between today's humanoids and a general workforce.
• Self-driving laboratories · future · progress: demonstrated
  Robotic labs where AI plans, runs, and analyzes experiments in closed loops, 24/7. This turns science from artisanal into industrial.
• AI-run mathematics · future · progress: demonstrated
  AI systems find, prove and formally check new theorems with people as reviewers. Expert verification, not generation, is now the bottleneck.
• Inverse materials design · future · progress: demonstrated
  Specify the properties and AI returns a synthesizable material. It is already producing millions of candidate crystals.
• REBCO high-field superconducting magnets at industrial scale · future · progress: demonstrated
  High-temperature superconducting tape (REBCO) magnets at 20 T and above, made by the thousand. They enable compact fusion, maglev, and magnetospheric shields.
• Mass-produced advanced fission · future · progress: demonstrated
  Factory-built reactors (molten salt, high-temperature gas, fast) deployed like aircraft engines. This is firm power for industry and space.
• Lights-out factories for most goods · future · progress: demonstrated
  Fully automated production lines in most industries, not just a few showcase plants.
• Fully reusable Starship and orbital refilling · future · progress: demonstrated
  Both stages caught and reflown and propellant transferred in orbit. Launch costs fall by another order of magnitude.
• Space nuclear power (kilowatt to megawatt reactors) · future · progress: demonstrated
  Compact reactors for lunar nights, Martian dust storms, and deep-space industry.
• In-situ resource utilization (propellant, water, metals) · future · progress: demonstrated
  Making propellant, oxygen, and metals from local ice and rock. MOXIE has made oxygen on Mars.
• Orbital industry · future · progress: demonstrated
  Factories, fuel depots, and assembly yards in orbit and on the Moon. Products include fibre optics, pharmaceuticals, and large structures.
• Autonomous construction robots · future · progress: demonstrated
  Robots that 3D-print and assemble buildings, roads, and landing pads, on Earth and off it.
• Space resource property law · future · progress: demonstrated
  Clear international rules for extracting and owning space resources (Artemis Accords and successors).
• Programmable metamaterials · future · progress: demonstrated
  Materials whose mechanical, optical, and thermal properties are designed in, from heat shields to cloaks for the radiation environment.
• Nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion · future · progress: demonstrated
  Halving transit times to Mars and opening the outer system. Ground-tested in the 1960s (NERVA).
• Whole mouse-brain connectome · future · progress: demonstrated
  Synapse-level wiring of a mammalian brain. Cubic-millimetre pieces have already been mapped (MICrONS).
• LLM-agent simulated societies · future · progress: demonstrated
  Populations of AI agents with realistic preferences, used to study how people respond to rules (generative agents, 2023).
• Digital twins of economies and cities · future · progress: demonstrated
  High-fidelity simulations of a real economy or city, calibrated on live data.
• Evidence-based policy at scale · future · progress: demonstrated
  Policy randomized trials, pre-registration, and sunset clauses as standard practice.
• Machine-readable, verified law · future · progress: demonstrated
  Legislation written as executable, formally checked code, so contradictions and loopholes are found before passage.
• Interplanetary internet · future · progress: demonstrated
  Laser relays and delay-tolerant networking linking Earth, Moon, and Mars.
• Long-duration grid storage · future · progress: demonstrated
  Week-long storage (iron-air, thermal, pumped) that makes intermittent power firm.
• Whole-genome synthesis · future · progress: demonstrated
  Writing entire genomes from scratch (synthetic yeast, then multicellular genomes) so organisms can be designed, not just edited.
• Organ cryopreservation and rewarming · future · progress: demonstrated
  Banking organs indefinitely by vitrification with uniform nanoparticle rewarming, already shown for rat kidneys.
• Charter cities and governance sandboxes · future · progress: demonstrated
  New jurisdictions that pilot rules at city scale and measure outcomes, the real-world test after simulation.
• Photonic and optical computing at scale · future · progress: demonstrated
  Moving data and some arithmetic onto light to break the power wall of electronic interconnect. It is needed for brain-scale emulation and energy-efficient AI.
• Space-based solar power · future · progress: demonstrated
  Gigawatt solar collectors in orbit beaming power to Earth and to orbital industry.
• Space gravitational-wave observatory (LISA) · future · progress: demonstrated
  LISA-class detectors listening to merging black holes across cosmic time. They are precision probes of spacetime's structure.
• Validated aging biomarkers as trial endpoints · future · progress: demonstrated
  Epigenetic and proteomic clocks accepted by regulators as surrogate endpoints, so longevity trials take years instead of decades.
• First AI-discovered drug approved · future · progress: demonstrated
  A drug whose target and molecule were both found by AI, completing regulatory approval.
• Population-scale cancer early detection · future · progress: demonstrated
  Blood tests that catch dozens of cancers at stage I across whole populations.
• In vivo CAR-T and off-the-shelf cell therapy · future · progress: demonstrated
  Engineering a patient's immune cells inside the body, with no lab manufacturing step.
• Routine xenotransplantation · future · progress: demonstrated
  Gene-edited pig organs as a standard transplant option.
• Targeted gene delivery to any tissue · future · progress: demonstrated
  Lipid nanoparticles and engineered capsids that reach any organ, including brain and muscle, on command.
• Cancer as a managed condition · future · progress: demonstrated
  Detection early enough and therapy precise enough that cancer rarely kills.
• High-bandwidth brain–computer interfaces · future · progress: demonstrated
  Implants with tens of thousands of channels, reading and writing neural activity at the speed of speech and beyond.
• Brain-scale neuromorphic hardware · future · progress: demonstrated
  Hardware that runs about 10^15 synapses in real time at practical power.
• Planetary climate engineering models · future · progress: demonstrated
  Climate and atmosphere models accurate enough to engineer a planet, tested first on Earth and Mars data.
• Food abundance via fermentation and cultivated food · future · progress: demonstrated
  Protein, fats, and sugars brewed from electricity, CO2, and microbes, decoupling food from farmland.
• Policy prediction markets and forecasting · future · progress: demonstrated
  Markets and forecasting tournaments that aggregate dispersed knowledge about policy outcomes.
• AI-administered permitting and services · future · progress: demonstrated
  Permits, benefits, and filings handled in minutes by audited AI agents.
• AI-mediated deliberation at scale · future · progress: demonstrated
  Tools that let millions of people find common ground (vTaiwan, Polis), consent at scale.
• Privacy-preserving identity and voting · future · progress: demonstrated
  Zero-knowledge proofs let citizens prove eligibility and vote verifiably without exposing personal data.
• Green hydrogen and e-fuels at scale · future · progress: demonstrated
  Cheap electrolytic hydrogen and synthetic fuels for steel, fertilizer, aviation, and rockets.
• Gigaton-scale carbon removal · future · progress: demonstrated
  Direct air capture and mineralization at gigatons per year, practice for planet-scale atmospheric engineering.
• Self-healing materials · future · progress: demonstrated
  Polymers, concretes, and alloys that repair cracks autonomously, critical for structures far from human maintenance.
• Designed synthetic cells · future · progress: demonstrated
  Cells built from designed parts, the chassis for pioneer organisms and living factories.
• Clearing aging aggregates · future · progress: demonstrated
  Engineered enzymes and antibodies that remove lipofuscin, amyloids, and crosslinks that cells cannot clear themselves.
• Continuous molecular health monitoring · future · progress: demonstrated
  Wearables and implants tracking biomarkers continuously, so disease is caught as a trend and not as a crisis.
• Autonomous robotic surgery · future · progress: demonstrated
  Surgical robots that plan and execute operations under supervision, making transplants and implants routine everywhere.
• Planetary defense (asteroid deflection) · future · progress: demonstrated
  Detecting and deflecting hazardous asteroids, shown by NASA's DART impact in 2022. The same skills later move icy bodies on purpose.
• Atom-interferometer gravity sensors · future · progress: demonstrated
  Matter-wave interferometers measuring gravity and spacetime with record precision.
• Networked optical atomic clocks · future · progress: demonstrated
  Clocks so precise that they sense centimetre changes in gravitational potential, a new instrument for testing relativity.
• Liquid democracy · future · progress: demonstrated
  Delegable, revocable votes that combine direct and representative democracy.
• Automation dividend · future · progress: demonstrated
  Sharing the output of a robot economy with every citizen, so abundance is universal and not concentrated.
• Artificial general intelligence · future · progress: early
  AI systems that match expert humans across most cognitive work, including open-ended research and engineering. It is the common engine behind nearly every moonshot.
• Verifiable AI alignment and oversight · future · progress: early
  Methods to specify, verify, and audit what powerful AI systems do and why. This is a precondition for trusting AI with science, governance, and our minds.
• Chemically exact molecular simulation · future · progress: early
  Predicting reactions, catalysts, and molecular machines from first principles before synthesis. This is the design tool for nanotech, batteries, drugs, and superconductors.
• Mechanistic interpretability · future · progress: early
  Reading the algorithms inside neural networks feature by feature, so AI reasoning can be audited rather than trusted blindly.
• International AI compute governance · future · progress: early
  Treaties and monitoring of frontier compute that make advanced AI development legible and cooperative.
• Scanning-probe mechanosynthesis · future · progress: early
  Placing individual atoms with a probe tip to form covalent bonds on command. Simple cases have been shown (Si atom manipulation); general reliability has not.
• Atomically precise manufacturing · future · progress: early
  Building products with every atom in its designed place: the bridge between biology's machines and Drexler's assemblers.
• "Solve Everything": AI-run science · future · progress: early
  Automated discovery across all fields: AI generates hypotheses, tests them in robotic labs, and formally verifies results. It feeds every capstone.
• Commercial fusion power · future · progress: early
  Net-electric fusion plants delivering power to the grid. Ignition has been shown; engineering the plant is the remaining work.
• Molecular-scale computing and control · future · progress: early
  Rod-logic or molecular processors that tell nanomachines what to build, with verified instruction sets.
• Sealed-assembler safety and governance · future · progress: early
  Broadcast-architecture assemblers, kill switches, and international standards, so nanotech is deployed with confidence instead of fear.
• Permanent lunar base · future · progress: early
  A crewed outpost at the lunar south pole with ice mining. The proving ground for living off-world.
• Asteroid mining · future · progress: early
  Extracting water, metals, and volatiles from near-Earth asteroids, the raw material base for the space economy.
• Virtual cell to virtual human simulation · future · progress: early
  Predictive simulation from molecules to organs, so therapies are tested in silico before any patient.
• Lunar mass driver · future · progress: early
  An electromagnetic launcher hurling lunar material to orbit cheaply, the industrial artery of O'Neill's space economy.
• Healthy demographics · future · progress: early
  Stabilising or above-replacement fertility keeps a young, growing pool of builders. The fertility collapse is a major slow drift.
• AI-automated AI research · future · progress: early
  AI agents that design, run and analyse AI experiments themselves, with people setting direction and judging results. Labs report intern-level systems already.
• AI-designed AI chips in a closed loop (RSI hardware) · future · progress: early
  AI designs the next accelerator, which trains a better designer, with tape-out, fabrication and verification increasingly automated. Each turn of the loop makes the next one faster.
• Recursive self-improvement (RSI) · future · progress: early
  AI systems that improve their own algorithms, training and hardware, each generation building the next. This is the bridge from AGI to superintelligence, and the point where verifiable alignment matters most.
• Self-replicating space factories · future · progress: early
  Stage 1 von Neumann probe: a seed factory in the solar system that turns asteroid or lunar material into copies of itself. Studied by NASA in 1980; RepRap and in-orbit printing are small first steps.
• Closed-loop ecological life support · future · progress: early
  Recycling air, water, and food at near 100%. The ISS recycles about 98% of its water; full closure has never lasted.
• Fusion propulsion · future · progress: early
  Direct fusion drives that make the solar system weeks wide, the prerequisite for moving comets and building megastructures.
• Human connectome at synaptic resolution · future · progress: early
  Mapping all of a human brain's roughly 86 billion neurons and their synapses, a zettabyte-scale imaging and AI problem.
• Simulationism: policy tested on simulated societies · future · progress: early
  Every major law is trialled first on validated simulated societies, then piloted, then measured. Jason sees this as the first step toward effective government.
• Deep-space radiation shielding · future · progress: early
  Active magnetic and passive shields protecting crews on years-long missions.
• Quantum simulation of quantum field theory and spacetime · future · progress: early
  Using quantum computers to simulate field theories and toy models of quantum gravity that no classical machine can, giving new physics a testbed.
• Superhot-rock geothermal · future · progress: early
  Drilling to supercritical-temperature rock for baseload power almost anywhere on Earth.
• Antimatter production at gram scale · future · progress: early
  Producing and storing antimatter in quantities useful for propulsion and high-energy physics. Today's output is nanograms, so this is an efficiency gap of many orders of magnitude.
• Atom-level recycling · future · progress: early
  Plasma separation and molecular sorting return any waste stream to pure feedstock, closing the loop on matter.
• Humans on Mars · future · progress: early
  The first crewed landing on Mars and a return home.
• Laser-sail interstellar probes · future · progress: early
  Gram-scale probes pushed by gigawatt lasers to about 20% of light speed (Breakthrough Starshot concept). These are the first robotic visits to nearby stars.
• Tabletop tests of quantum gravity · future · progress: early
  Entangling masses through gravity alone to show, for the first time, whether gravity is quantum.
• Engineered negative-energy (Casimir) cavities · future · progress: early
  Measuring and shaping the small negative energy densities quantum fields already allow between plates, the only known foothold toward exotic matter.
• Physics beyond the Standard Model · future · progress: early
  Identifying dark matter, dark energy, and the next layer of particle physics, and with them new possible handles on spacetime.
• Warp-metric energy reduced to physical scale · future · progress: early
  Reshaping the warp metric so it needs planetary rather than galactic mass-energy; published refinements have cut estimates by many orders of magnitude.
• Aging as an approvable indication · future · progress: early
  Regulators accept "slowing aging" as a treatable target, unlocking investment in therapies that prevent many diseases at once.
• Approved senolytic therapies · future · progress: early
  Drugs that clear senescent cells and are approved for age-related disease.
• Multiplex somatic genome editing · future · progress: early
  Safely rewriting dozens of genes in adult tissue at once, from protective variants to whole-pathway upgrades.
• Complete causal model of aging · future · progress: early
  A mechanistic map of how the hallmarks of aging interact, showing which interventions reset the system.
• Partial reprogramming therapies in humans · future · progress: early
  Cyclic Yamanaka-factor treatments that restore youthful epigenetic states without causing cancer.
• Immune system rejuvenation · future · progress: early
  Regrowing the thymus and resetting immune memory, restoring a young immune system.
• Organs on demand · future · progress: early
  Grown, printed, or xeno-derived replacement organs for anyone who needs them, matched to their own cells.
• Vascularized bioprinted tissue · future · progress: early
  Printing thick tissue with working blood vessels, the bottleneck for printed organs.
• Neural integration (human–AI merge) · future · progress: early
  Thought-speed, two-way links between human cortex and AI systems that feel like extensions of the self.
• Molecular-state brain mapping · future · progress: early
  Recording synapse strengths, receptor types, and gene expression, not just wiring, which emulation likely needs.
• Whole-brain emulation of a simple animal · future · progress: early
  A simulated worm, fly, or mouse brain that behaves like the original in a virtual body.
• Hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995) · future · progress: early
  Why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all (Chalmers, 1995), and a theory predicting which systems are conscious and whether an emulation or gradual replacement preserves the person. This gates identity continuity for uploading. 'Solved' may never be cleanly provable: progress may come as converging, tested theories rather than a proof.
• Engineered pioneer organisms · future · progress: early
  Microbes and lichens designed to survive Martian cold, radiation, and perchlorate soil while making oxygen and soil.
• Engineered super-greenhouse gas production · future · progress: early
  Factories releasing fluorinated gases to warm Mars by tens of degrees.
• Orbital mirrors and solettas · future · progress: early
  Large thin-film mirrors that focus sunlight on polar caps, releasing frozen CO2.
• Artificial magnetosphere at Mars L1 · future · progress: early
  A superconducting dipole shield at Mars–Sun L1 that protects a thickened atmosphere from solar-wind stripping.
• Volatile delivery: redirecting icy bodies · future · progress: early
  Steering comets or Kuiper-belt ice to deliver water and nitrogen to Mars. The energy and precision needed are vast.
• Planetary stewardship institutions · future · progress: early
  Governance able to manage century-scale planetary projects and Earth's own climate, with legitimacy across generations.
• Futarchy: vote on values, bet on beliefs · future · progress: early
  Robin Hanson's proposal: citizens choose goals, and policies are adopted when markets predict they will advance them.
• Full-sensory immersive virtual worlds · future · progress: early
  Virtual environments indistinguishable from reality to the senses: virtual bodies for emulated minds and new art forms.
• Radiation-resistant human cells · future · progress: early
  Borrowing DNA-protection genes (such as tardigrade Dsup) and repair pathways to protect astronauts and slow damage-driven aging.
• Suspended animation and hibernation · future · progress: early
  Safely pausing human metabolism for months, for emergency medicine and long voyages.
• Neurodegeneration cured · future · progress: early
  Stopping and reversing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS, a prerequisite for a healthy brain over centuries.
• Mitochondrial repair · future · progress: early
  Replacing or backing up damaged mitochondrial DNA (allotopic expression), one of the hallmarks of aging.
• Next-generation collider (FCC / CEPC) · future · progress: early
  A ~90 km collider (CERN's FCC or China's CEPC) to study the Higgs with precision and then reach ~100 TeV, an order of magnitude beyond the LHC, using high-field superconducting magnets. Both are at the planning stage.
• Rigorous warp and wormhole mathematics · future · progress: early
  AI-assisted, formally verified analysis of which spacetime geometries are physically allowed and at what energy cost.
• Ethics and law of digital minds · future · progress: early
  Personhood, rights, and consent frameworks for emulated and merged minds, so uploading is a choice protected by law.
• Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness (unforced) · future · progress: early
  Millennium Prize problem: do smooth 3D fluid flows stay smooth forever? The unforced question remains open.
• Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture · future · progress: early
  Millennium Prize problem: the rank of an elliptic curve equals the order of vanishing of its L-function at 1.
• Nature of dark energy · future · progress: early
  What drives the accelerating expansion of the universe: a cosmological constant or something that evolves?
• Origin of life (abiogenesis) · future · progress: early
  How chemistry became biology: a full, reproducible path from simple molecules to a self-replicating, evolving cell.
• Practical reversible / near-Landauer computing · future · progress: early
  Computing that approaches the thermodynamic minimum energy per operation. It is required for planet- and brain-scale simulation without planet-scale heat.
• Aneutronic fusion (p–B11, D–He3) · future · progress: early
  Fusion that releases energy mostly as charged particles, allowing direct conversion to electricity with little neutron damage. It is far harder than D–T fusion.
• Defect-free carbon nanomaterials at scale · future · progress: early
  Kilometre-long nanotubes and wafer-scale graphene without defects. These are the materials for space tethers, superconductors, and nanomachines.
• Space elevators and orbital tethers · future · progress: early
  Lifting mass to orbit by cable instead of rockets. Feasible first on the Moon and Mars, and on Earth if nanotube strength scales.
• Universal flu vaccine · future · progress: early
  One vaccine covering all influenza strains, the template for universal vaccines.
• Fusion fuel cycle (tritium breeding, helium-3) · future · progress: early
  Closing the fuel cycle for D–T fusion and sourcing helium-3 for advanced fuels.
• Faster-than-light travel (effective FTL) · future · progress: none
  Reaching other stars in less time than light takes, by engineering spacetime itself (an Alcubierre-type warp metric or a traversable wormhole) rather than outrunning light locally. Every known route needs physics we do not have yet, so this spire is the tallest.
• Unlimited healthy human lifespan · future · progress: none
  Aging stops being a cause of death: damage is repaired faster than it accumulates, in every tissue, including the brain. It is largely an engineering and biology problem, with no new physics required.
• Terraforming · future · progress: none
  Making another world, most likely Mars, habitable to unprotected life by thickening its atmosphere, warming it, shielding it, and seeding a biosphere. No new physics is needed, but the industrial scale is enormous and needs a self-replicating space economy.
• Effective, efficient government · future · progress: none
  Government that reliably delivers outcomes at low cost and with consent: policies are tested before enactment, measured after, and administered with near-zero friction. It is mostly a social-technology problem, so the chain is short but adoption is hard.
• Post-scarcity energy and matter · future · progress: none
  Energy, materials, food, water, and manufactured goods become so cheap that material scarcity stops constraining human lives. It combines abundant clean energy with self-replicating automation and atomically precise manufacturing.
• Mind uploading / human–AI merge · future · progress: none
  A human mind that continues on (or seamlessly extends into) a computational substrate, by gradual neural integration or whole-brain emulation. The deepest unknown is not engineering but whether, and how, identity and experience carry over.
• Nanomachines (molecular assemblers) · future · progress: none
  Drexler-style molecular nanotechnology: programmable machines that build almost anything atom by atom, from diamondoid structures to medical nanobots. It is engineering-limited, not physics-limited, but no one has yet demonstrated a general assembler.
• Binding machine-ethics law (Asimov-style laws in statute) · future · progress: none
  Enforceable law that AI systems themselves must obey (harm avoidance, obedience within limits, honesty), verified in the systems and not just required of their makers.
• Diamondoid mechanosynthesis at scale · future · progress: none
  Showing that stiff diamondoid structures can be assembled reliably, answering the Drexler–Smalley "fat fingers" objection in practice.
• Programmable molecular assemblers · future · progress: none
  General-purpose machines that build other products, including copies of themselves, from molecular feedstock.
• Self-replicating robot industry · future · progress: none
  Factories run by robots that build robots and the factories that make them, so capital stock grows exponentially.
• Superintelligence · future · progress: none
  Intelligence far beyond the best humans in science and engineering. Its limits are unknown (tier 3), but it would compress centuries of R&D into years.
• Cell-repair nanomachines · future · progress: none
  Medical nanobots that patrol tissues, removing damage and repairing DNA (Freitas's nanomedicine program).
• Permanent crewed Mars outpost · future · progress: none
  Continuously crewed Mars base resupplied from Earth: the step between a first landing and a self-sustaining city.
• Energy too cheap to meter · future · progress: none
  Clean electricity at a fraction of today's cost, everywhere. Desalination, direct air capture, and atom-level recycling become cheap.
• Solar-system power swarm (Dyson swarm segments) · future · progress: none
  Self-replicating factories turn asteroid material into collectors orbiting the Sun, scaling energy capture by orders of magnitude. Needed for planet-scale and spacetime-scale engineering.
• Self-sustaining Mars city · future · progress: none
  A million-person city that can survive if the ships stop coming, and the industrial base for terraforming.
• Interstellar communication network · future · progress: none
  Laser and gravitational-lens relays linking star systems, the nervous system of any FTL civilization.
• A theory unifying GR and QM that permits spacetime engineering · future · progress: none
  An empirically confirmed theory of quantum gravity that also says how spacetime geometry can be engineered. Without it, FTL remains speculation.
• Exotic matter / negative energy density at macroscopic scale · future · progress: none
  Matter or field configurations violating the energy conditions over metres, not nanometres. Every known warp or wormhole solution requires it.
• Resolving FTL causality (chronology protection) · future · progress: none
  Understanding whether faster-than-light travel necessarily allows time-travel paradoxes, and how nature prevents or permits them.
• Laboratory spacetime metric engineering · future · progress: none
  A measurable, deliberately engineered distortion of spacetime in the lab: the first "warp field" experiment.
• Traversable wormhole stabilization · future · progress: none
  Creating and holding open a wormhole throat large enough to pass signals, then matter (Morris–Thorne solution).
• Uncrewed warp-bubble probe · future · progress: none
  The first craft to make an effective superluminal hop, powered by solar-system-scale energy.
• Crewed warp-capable starship · future · progress: none
  A ship that carries people to another star within a human lifetime, then within weeks.
• Longevity escape velocity · future · progress: none
  Life expectancy rises by more than a year per year: therapies outpace aging.
• Brain rejuvenation that preserves identity · future · progress: none
  Restoring youthful neurons and synapses while keeping the memories and personality they encode. Deep unknowns remain about how identity is stored.
• Non-destructive whole-brain readout · future · progress: none
  Reading a living brain's full state without destroying it, through nanoscale probes or new imaging physics.
• Whole-brain emulation of a human · future · progress: none
  Running a human mind's dynamics on computers with functional fidelity.
• Mars atmosphere thickened to survivable pressure · future · progress: none
  Raising surface pressure above the Armstrong limit so people need only oxygen masks.
• Ecopoiesis: seeding a self-sustaining biosphere · future · progress: none
  Establishing a succession of engineered ecosystems that build soil and oxygen over generations.
• Rotating space habitats · future · progress: none
  O'Neill cylinders with artificial gravity, homes for millions off Earth.
• Dark matter identified · future · progress: none
  Detecting what dark matter is, the first new ingredient of the universe since the Standard Model.
• Outer-moon settlement (Titan, Callisto or Ganymede) · future · progress: none
  A crewed base among the giant planets. Callisto sits outside Jupiter's worst radiation; Titan has a thick atmosphere and hydrocarbons.
• Riemann hypothesis · future · progress: none
  Millennium Prize problem: all nontrivial zeros of the zeta function lie on the critical line. It underpins the distribution of primes.
• P vs NP · future · progress: none
  Millennium Prize problem: can every quickly checked solution also be quickly found? The answer shapes cryptography, AI and optimization.
• Yang–Mills existence and mass gap · future · progress: none
  Millennium Prize problem: give quantum Yang–Mills theory a rigorous footing and prove its lightest particle has positive mass.
• Hodge conjecture · future · progress: none
  Millennium Prize problem linking the topology of complex algebraic varieties to their algebraic subvarieties.
• Matter–antimatter asymmetry · future · progress: none
  Why the universe contains matter but almost no antimatter. The Standard Model's CP violation is far too small to explain it.
• Interstellar von Neumann probe · future · progress: none
  Stage 2: a probe that reaches another star system, builds copies of itself from local material and sends them on, spreading across the galaxy at sublight speed. If such probes are possible, their absence is one form of the Fermi paradox.
• Room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor · future · progress: none
  A material that superconducts without cooling or crushing pressure. It is not known to exist (tier 3, an open question in condensed-matter physics), but it would transform grids, magnets, and computing.
• Engineered pandemic risk 2030 · future
  Speculative risk.
• Loss of human control over autonomous systems 2035 · future
  Speculative. In Asimov's terms: autonomous systems are delegated goals and authority faster than enforceable rules of conduct and human oversight are built.