1 week ago
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Jackie Snow
Mon, April 13, 2026 astatine 10:22 AM CDT 4 min read
Every year, Stanford University releases what has go the closest happening the AI manufacture has to an authoritative scorecard. Now successful its ninth variation and moving 423 pages, the AI Index tracks astir everything: however galore models were released and by whom, however overmuch wealth flowed into the industry, however AI is reshaping labour markets, what it's doing to the powerfulness grid, and however the nationalist feels astir each of it. The study is wide cited by policymakers, journalists, and executives — and supported by partners including Google and OpenAI portion being partially written by radical who enactment astatine these and different AI companies.
With that successful mind, present are a fewer findings worthy pulling out.
The U.S.-China AI exemplary show spread has efficaciously closed. As of March 2026, Anthropic's apical exemplary leads the champion Chinese rival by conscionable 2.7 percent points, a borderline that has flip-flopped repeatedly since DeepSeek's R1 concisely matched American models successful February 2025.
The U.S. inactive produces much top-tier models — 50 notable releases successful 2025 compared to China's 30 — and commands a monolithic backstage concern lead, $285.9 cardinal to China's $12.4 billion. But the study notes that fig importantly understates China's full spending, since authorities guidance funds person channeled an estimated $184 cardinal into Chinese AI firms since 2000. China besides present leads the satellite successful AI publications, citation share, patent grants, and concern robot installations.
Some American AI companies person their ain mentation for wherefore the spread is closing: they accidental Chinese labs person been stealing it. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google person begun sharing quality connected what they telephone adversarial distillation — grooming models connected a competitor's outputs to replicate their capabilities astatine a fraction of the cost. They assertion DeepSeek and others person done this without authorization, though they person yet to merchandise grounds showing however overmuch of China's caller advancement is really attributable to distillation alternatively than autarkic development.
The state hosts 5,427 of them, compared to 449 successful China and astir 525 each successful Germany and the United Kingdom. Total AI information halfway powerfulness capableness reached 29.6 gigawatts by the extremity of 2025, astir equivalent to New York authorities astatine highest demand.
That standard comes with a cost. Training a azygous model, Grok 4, produced an estimated 72,816 tons of CO2 equivalent, much c than astir 1,000 mean cars emit implicit their full lifetimes. Running models creates its ain footprint. Annual h2o usage for GPT-4o inference unsocial could transcend the drinking h2o needs of 12 cardinal people, according to the report's estimates.
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