Punctuated Equilibria in Artificial Intelligence: The Institutional Scaling Law and the Speciation of Sovereign AI
The dominant narrative of artificial intelligence development assumes that progress is continuous and that capability scales monotonically with model size. We challenge both assumptions. Drawing on punctuated equilibrium theory from evolutionary biology, we show that AI development proceeds not through smooth advancement but through extended periods of stasis interrupted by rapid phase transitions that reorganize the competitive landscape. We identify five such eras since 1943 and four epochs within the current Generative AI Era, each initiated by a discontinuous event -- from the transformer architecture to the DeepSeek Moment -- that rendered the prior paradigm subordinate. To formalize...
| Authors | Mark Baciak, Thomas A. Cellucci, Deanna M. Falkowski |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 15 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 March 2026 |
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