Overview

• Chinese AI models now rival U.S. counterparts in performance, with the gap on key benchmarks narrowing to just 0.3 percentage points by the end of 2024.
• Open-weight AI models, such as Meta's LLaMa and China's DeepSeek, have become nearly as competitive as closed-weight systems, with a performance difference of only 1.7% in early 2025.
• The AI industry saw record private investment of $150.8 billion in 2024, alongside increased global participation from regions like the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
• Advances in efficiency have enabled smaller AI models to achieve performance levels that previously required significantly larger architectures.
• Synthetic data is poised to play a critical role in AI development as internet training data is projected to be exhausted between 2026 and 2032.