Case study · July 2026
AINowOut-Scores999of1,000PeopleonanIQTest
What the viral chart gets right, what it gets wrong, and what five years of climbing actually looked like.
Theclaim
A chart going around LinkedIn says AI "IQ" rose from 79 to 145 in five years, gaining 2.5 points a month with no sign of slowing. Most of its scores are real — they come from Maxim Lott's Tracking AI project, which gives models the Mensa Norway pattern test.
The pace claim is not real. The top of the leaderboard has been compressing since December, and the early data points are estimates.
This is everyone alive, from the year 1000 to today.
In 2021, GPT-3 takes the test. It scores 79 — ahead of about 8% of people.
Early 2024: GPT-4 scores 101. Dead average. Half of humanity is now behind it.
September 2024: o1 scores 120. Nine people in ten score lower.
Mid 2025: o3 hits 136. The red covers 99% of the world.
Today the red covers 99.9% of everyone alive. The blue sliver at the top is the last 0.1%.
World population, UN and HYDE estimates. Red: the share the best model out-scores. Bottom strip: AI training compute, log scale.
Thesamestory,inoneroom
Percentiles are hard to feel. So shrink the world to a room of a thousand people, sorted by score, with a line down the middle.
2021. GPT-3 scores 79 and beats 81 people in this room.
Early 2024. GPT-4 scores 101 — average — and half the room crosses at once.
September 2024. o1 scores 120. Now 909 are across.
Mid 2025. o3 scores 136. Eight people left.
Today the frontier sits at 145. One person in this room still out-scores it.
Each dot is one person, normally distributed (mean 100, SD 15).
Thepeopleitpassed
The scale means more with real people on it.
In 2021, the best AI sat at 79 — below every rung on this ladder.
Early 2024: 101. Past the average adult.
Early 2025: 127. Past Richard Feynman’s school IQ test, which said 125.
Mid 2025: 136. Past Mensa’s cutoff, past Kasparov’s reported 135.
Past Terman’s 1916 “genius” line at 140. Einstein? Never tested — every figure you’ve seen for him is invented.
People with sourced scores. Einstein is drawn dashed because he was never tested.
About that Feynman number
A school test put Feynman at 125, and he became one of the smartest humans of his century. If the test could miss Feynman by that much, it can misjudge a machine in either direction — this measures one narrow skill, not thinking.
Ifyouciteit
Safe: the measured scores — o1 at 120, Claude 4 Sonnet at 127, o3 at 136, the 2026 frontier at 141 to 147 — credited to Tracking AI and the Mensa Norway test. Drop: the "2.5 points a month" claim, the early anchors, and the bare word "IQ."
Thefullinteractivestudy
All five charts with their controls, the data table behind every number, and the caveats.
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