How do you gauge how fast AI is moving? Nico starts with chimpanzees.
On Monday's show my co-host Nico Lafakis put human evolution next to model evolution. By his figure, "we are 1.8% away from chimpanzees," and it still took "hundreds of thousands of years to get to where we are today." Even "useful, legitimate technology" took thousands of years, and he rounded the whole stretch to "10k" (years, as he told it).
His point: "we really started out pretty blank slate."
Those are Nico's numbers from the show. I'm passing them along as his, not as measurements.
If you want a way to think about pace and starting points, this is the comparison he reaches for.
Watch the episode: https://valuefirststudios.com/media/episode/vf-ai-daily-2026-10-26
Where this came from
There Is No Perfect SystemWatch the full conversation this clip was pulled from.
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