The AI model race has suddenly gotten a lot closer, say Stanford scholars

Stanford University The competition to create the world's top artificial intelligence models has become something of a scrimmage, a pile of worthy contenders all on top of one another, with less and less of a clear victory by anyone. According to scholars at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the number of contenders in "frontier" or "foundation" models has expanded substantially in recent years, but the difference between the best and the weakest has also narrowed substantially. In 2024, "the Elo score difference between the top and 10th-ranked model on the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard was 11.9%. By early 2025, this gap had narrowed to just 5.4%," write Rishi Bommasani and team in "The AI Index 2025 Annual Report" Also: Is OpenAI doomed? Open-source models may crush it, warns expert In the chapter on technical performance, Bommasani and colleagues relate that in 2022, when ChatGPT first emerged, the top large language models were dominated by ... Read full article.