Stanford's 2026 AI index just dropped: the US spends 23x more than China on AI, but the performance gap is down to 2.7%
I went through Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index Report this weekend and one number keeps bugging me. The top US model and the top Chinese model are now separated by 2.7% on the Arena leaderboard. In 2023 that gap was north of 17 percentage points. It basically evaporated in under three years. The part