Movements
23 technology waves tracked month by month since they emerged: 4 rising, 11 peak, 6 plateau, 2 declining. Curves through August 2026.
23 of 23 movements
| Movement | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physical AIRisingsince Nov 2024Models that perceive and act in the physical world: robots, self-driving and the simulators that train them. | Rising | Nov 2024 | +32% | |
| Open-weight modelsRisingsince Feb 2023Models whose trained weights anyone can download, run and fine-tune: Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and more. | Rising | Feb 2023 | +6% | |
| Agentic codingRisingsince Feb 2025Coding agents that read a repository, run commands and tests, and change code across files on their own. | Rising | Feb 2025 | -6% | |
| World modelsRisingsince Mar 2018Models that learn how an environment behaves and can simulate it, for games, video and training robots. | Rising | Mar 2018 | -26% | |
| Small language modelsPeaksince Jun 2023Compact models, a few billion parameters or less, trained to be good enough and cheap to run anywhere. | Peak | Jun 2023 | +44% | |
| Inference chipsPeaksince Apr 2017Accelerators built to serve models cheaply and fast rather than to train them: TPUs, LPUs, wafer-scale and custom silicon. | Peak | Apr 2017 | +39% | |
| Mixture of expertsPeaksince Jan 2017Models split into many expert blocks with only a few active per token, so they grow in size without growing in cost. | Peak | Jan 2017 | +7% | |
| Vector databasesPeaksince Feb 2017Databases that store embeddings and find the nearest ones fast, the retrieval layer under RAG and semantic search. | Peak | Feb 2017 | +7% | |
| Humanoid robotsPeaksince May 2016General-purpose robots shaped like people, now driven by learned models instead of hand-written control. | Peak | May 2016 | +5% | |
| LLMOps and evalsPeaksince Mar 2023Measuring, tracing and monitoring model-backed software: eval suites, LLM observability and prompt management. | Peak | Mar 2023 | +5% | |
| Multimodal AIPeaksince Jan 2021Models that read and write more than text: images, audio and video in the same model. | Peak | Jan 2021 | +3% | |
| AI agentsPeaksince Mar 2023Models that plan and act in steps, calling tools and other services until a task is done. | Peak | Mar 2023 | 0% | |
| MCPPeaksince Nov 2024Model Context Protocol: an open standard for connecting models and agents to tools and data sources. | Peak | Nov 2024 | -2% | |
| AI searchPeaksince Feb 2023Search that answers with a written summary and citations instead of ten blue links, and the deep research agents that followed. | Peak | Feb 2023 | -9% | |
| Local AIPeaksince Mar 2023Running language and image models on your own laptop, phone or server instead of a cloud API. | Peak | Mar 2023 | -19% | |
| Computer usePlateausince Oct 2024Agents that operate a computer the way a person does, reading the screen and moving the mouse and keyboard. | Plateau | Oct 2024 | +36% | |
| Reasoning modelsPlateausince Sep 2024Models trained with reinforcement learning to think step by step, spending more compute at answer time. | Plateau | Sep 2024 | +11% | |
| RAGPlateausince May 2020Retrieval-augmented generation: a model answers from documents fetched for the question instead of from memory alone. | Plateau | May 2020 | +3% | |
| AI browsersPlateausince Feb 2024Web browsers with an assistant or agent built in that reads pages and does tasks on them for you. | Plateau | Feb 2024 | -4% | |
| Context engineeringPlateausince Jan 2024Deciding what goes into a model's context window, and in what order: instructions, retrieved documents, tools and memory. | Plateau | Jan 2024 | -5% | |
| Vibe codingPlateausince Feb 2025Building software by describing it to a model and accepting what it writes, without reading the code closely. | Plateau | Feb 2025 | -22% | |
| Synthetic dataDecliningsince Dec 2020Training and evaluation data generated by models or simulators instead of collected from people. | Declining | Dec 2020 | +13% | |
| Prompt engineeringDecliningsince Jul 2021Writing and testing the instructions given to a model to get reliable answers. | Declining | Jul 2021 | -9% |
Sources: Hacker News story titles (Algolia), Wikipedia pageviews, arXiv papers (through DataCite) and Trending's own daily items. The stage rule is on the method page.