China · Sherwood News
Stanford AI report: Model capability accelerating, China has closed the gap with the US
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Stanford’s annual AI Index Report says “leading models are now nearly indistinguishable” from each other, and benchmarks used to evaluate them are falling behind their accelerating capabilities.
Key facts
- SpaceX thinks its total addressable market (TAM) is a whopping $28.5 trillion for its businesses, according to an S-1 filing for its upcoming IPO reviewed by Reuters
- New requirements such as imposing a $100,000 fee that employers must pay per H-1B hire have resulted in a sharp drop in AI researchers coming to the US
- The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months
- The company says roughly 90% could come from AI — largely selling artificial intelligence tools to businesses
Summary
China has closed the gap with the US in the global competition for AI model superiority, and any talk of an AI performance plateau is flat-out wrong. Models are continuing to make impressive leaps in performance, and the pace is accelerating, the 2026 edition of the report finds. Last year’s class of AI models have been steadily approaching or surpassing human baseline scores on benchmarks, with AI's ability to operate a computer independently jumping from near zero to above 75% of human performance in a single year. However, all of the major frontier models are clustered at the top of the benchmark charts together, all separated by a few points between them.