Have Chinese Models Caught Up With the US Frontier?
scaling01 · x · 2026-07-19
This deep dive attempts to answer whether Chinese AI models have caught up with the US frontier. The author notes that while the Artificial Intelligence Index isn't ideal for directly measuring true model strength, the article later uses it to predict the ECI of Kimi-K3, making the approach somewhat contradictory.
The author compares two metrics: Artificial Intelligence Index and ECI. The conclusion is that AAI is less discriminative than ECI regarding model strength, and a fitted log-linear regression reveals that "Chinese models are overestimated on AAI." Specifically, only 36.7% of Chinese models score above the regression line, compared to 57.5% of US models.
Based on this regression line, the author estimates a predicted ECI of 158.33 for Kimi-K3, with an 80% confidence interval. The article's focus isn't a single leaderboard, but rather an exploration of the US-China model capability gap and metric biases using multiple public indicators.
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