The AI revolution is 'unprecedented' in the scale of human history, new report finds

They're talking about rate of uptake. Some of that is just because the world had been so disconnected until relatively-recently that no technology could have managed to spread at that sort of rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder

Gunpowder is the first explosive to have been developed. Popularly listed as one of the "Four Great Inventions" of China, it was invented during the late Tang dynasty (9th century) while the earliest recorded chemical formula for gunpowder dates to the Song dynasty (11th century). Knowledge of gunpowder spread rapidly throughout Asia and Europe, possibly as a result of the Mongol conquests during the 13th century, with written formulas for it appearing in the Middle East between 1240 and 1280 in a treatise by Hasan al-Rammah, and in Europe by 1267 in the Opus Majus by Roger Bacon.

So it was invented in China in the 800s and took maybe four hundred years to spread through Europe...and that was considered a rapid spread.

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They're talking about rate of uptake. Some of that is just because the world had been so disconnected until relatively-recently that no technology could have managed to spread at that sort of rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder
Gunpowder is the first explosive to have been developed. Popularly listed as one of the "Four Great Inventions" of China, it was invented during the late Tang dynasty (9th century) while the earliest recorded chemical formula for gunpowder dates to the Song dynasty (11th century). Knowledge of gunpowder spread rapidly throughout Asia and Europe, possibly as a result of the Mongol conquests during the 13th century, with written formulas for it appearing in the Middle East between 1240 and 1280 in a treatise by Hasan al-Rammah, and in Europe by 1267 in the Opus Majus by Roger Bacon.
So it was invented in China in the 800s and took maybe four hundred years to spread through Europe...and that was considered a rapid spread.