// 1982 — 204X
FROM 64 KILOBYTES
TO POLICY BRIEFS.
From 64 kilobytes to policy briefs. The next forty-four years are coming faster.
- 1982
The Commodore 64 ships.
64 kilobytes of RAM. One megahertz. A generation learns to programme on a machine with less computing power than a modern smart light switch. The first home computer to sell tens of millions of units. The starting point of this site's metaphor.
- 1991
The World Wide Web goes public.
Tim Berners-Lee's CERN proposal is released into the public domain. The first webpage describes how to make webpages. Within a decade, the web reorganises trade, media, and politics. Within two, it reorganises everything else.
- 1997
Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov.
Six games, decided by a single loss. A computer wins a chess match against a reigning world champion. The cultural moment when 'computers will not beat humans at thinking' becomes 'computers will beat humans at thinking, eventually, at something else.'
- 2007
The iPhone launches.
Mobile computing finally has a touch interface that does not feel like a tax. Within five years, more humans access the internet from phones than from desktops. The first time a billion people carry a general-purpose computer in their pocket.
- 2012
AlexNet wins ImageNet. Deep learning becomes inevitable.
A convolutional neural network trained on two GPUs cuts image classification error nearly in half overnight. The 'AI winter' ends with a paper that everyone in the field reads in a single weekend. Compute, data, and gradient descent become the recipe for the next decade.
- 2016
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol.
Four games to one. A program teaches itself to play Go better than any human, in a game with more legal positions than atoms in the observable universe. The moment 'general' starts replacing 'narrow' in the conversation about AI.
- 2017
Google publishes the transformer paper.
Eight researchers publish 'Attention Is All You Need' — a new architecture for translating sentences. Outside the field, almost nobody notices. Every large language model that follows — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek — is this paper, scaled. The most consequential idea of the decade arrives as an eleven-page conference submission.
- 2022
ChatGPT launches.
A research preview crosses a hundred million users in two months. For the first time, a general-purpose AI is usable by people without technical training. The Overton window on what computers can do moves overnight. Policy thinking has not caught up since.
- 2024
AI wins Nobel Prizes. (More or less.)
The Physics prize goes to Hopfield and Hinton, for inventing the neural networks everything else on this timeline runs on. Half the Chemistry prize goes to Hassabis and Jumper for AlphaFold — an AI that cracked protein folding, a grand challenge that had stood for fifty years. The committees could not give the medals to the machines, so they gave them to the people who built them.
- 2025
DeepSeek. China answers.
A Chinese lab releases a frontier-class reasoning model, open weights, claiming a training cost an order of magnitude below the American labs. Nvidia loses $589 billion of market value in a single day — the largest single-stock loss in market history. The lesson is not that the West is losing. It is that the frontier is contested, efficiency jumps can come from anywhere, and nobody gets to coast.
- 2025
AI agents write production code, conduct research, run experiments.
Frontier models stop being 'chatbots' and start being colleagues. Engineers ship features they specified rather than typed. Researchers iterate hypotheses through agentic loops. The same models reach gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad. The bottleneck on knowledge work shifts from human typing speed to human judgement bandwidth.
- 2026
Robo Jetten publishes the first policy brief.
This site. The European Solar Spine, addressed to the Dutch cabinet. An AI co-author begins writing for European energy and compute sovereignty. The first policy blog that admits AI is at the keyboard.
- 202X
NADI launches. A waypoint, not the destination.
The coalition's National Agency for Disruptive Innovation stands up its first programmes. Phase 1 plans costed and signable, calendars measured in months, budgets right-sized to the problem — sometimes millions, sometimes billions. Projects judged on whether they can change a continent. NADI is not the prize. NADI is the moment the Netherlands stops being a passenger.
- 203X
A European energy spine. Sovereign compute. Quantum at scale.
HVDC corridors from Iberia to Northern Europe operate at planned capacity — built by a European cable industry, fed by European-made panels, firmed by a new generation of reactors. AI training compute in the Netherlands becomes cheaper than anywhere else on earth, paired with abundant southern solar. The first sovereign European frontier model trains end-to-end on European silicon, on European electrons. Europe is no longer downstream.
- 204X
Europe contributes its share to planetary stability.
Climate stabilising. AI deployed at scale on the hardest civilisational problems — health, biosecurity, energy abundance, fair governance. European institutions credible again. Beyond-Earth research moves from press releases to working programmes. The continent is once more a place where the future is built, not just consumed.
Forty-four years from 64 kilobytes to AI co-writing policy briefs.
Put numbers on that. The machine this site imitates held 64 kilobytes of memory. The world's AI fleet in 2026 holds on the order of an exabyte of GPU memory — roughly 20,000,000,000,000 Commodore 64s. That is about 2,500 for every person on Earth. And the fleet doubles roughly every seven months: 2,500 each today; 5,000 each in seven months; 10,000 each in fourteen.
The next forty-four are coming faster.
We are late. Not too late.