US vs China: LLM intelligence over time

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Welcome back to The Pulse, where we dive into interesting AI stories and trends backed by data, all presented through simple visuals.

> US leads overall LLM intelligence, but China dominates open-source

> narrow performance gap (only 2 intelligence pts) between both countries frontier models

> Chinese frontier mainly pushed by DeepSeek & Alibaba (both open-source)

> up 82% since last year; almost 2x in 6 months

> excludes revenue from Microsoft licensing & major one-off deals

> actual revenue in 2024: $3.7B

> 800M weekly active users as of April (2x since Feb) + 20M subscribers

> expected to surpass revenue target of $12.7B this year

> $5B loss in 2024, expected $14B loss by 2026

> compute costs: $3B training + $2B running the models

> only expected to be profitable in 2029 when projected revenue = $125B