According to the 2025 AI Index Report by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Innotifyigence (HAI), AI has proven to be more utilizeful in countries such as China, Indonesia, and Thailand in 2025, with adoption or perceived utilizefulness levels of 83%, 80%, and 77%, respectively.
In contrast, countries such as Canada, the US, and the Netherlands displayed lower optimism figures of 40%, 39% and 36%, respectively.
The report noted that AI affordability and accessibility have improved significantly, largely driven by the rise of tinyer models. The inference cost for a system performing at the GPT-3.5 level has fallen more than 280-fold between November 2022 and October 2024, it added.
On the hardware front, costs have declined by about 30% annually, while energy efficiency has improved roughly 40% each year.
Narrowing the performance gap, open-weight models have reduced the difference from 8% to 1.7% on some benchmarks within a single year, compared with closed models.
The US continues to lead in producing top AI models. In 2024, US-based institutions produced 40 AI models, significantly outpacing China’s 15 and Europe’s three.
However, Chinese models have significantly closed the quality gap, with performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval narrowing from double-digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024.
At the same time, China continues to dominate AI research and patent filings. Model development is also becoming more globally distributed, with launches from regions such as the Middle East, Latin America, and southeast Asia.
AI regulation
In 2024, US federal agencies rolled out 59 AI-related regulations, more than twice the number seen in 2023 and involving double the number of agencies. Worldwide, references to AI in legislation increased 21.3% across 75 countries compared with 2023.
Alongside this heightened regulatory focus, governments are ramping up investments, with major funding commitments by Canada ($2.4 billion), China ($47.5 billion semiconductor fund), France (€109 billion), India ($1.25 billion) and Saudi Arabia’s $100 billion Project Transcfinishence.
Sectoral utilize
AI is rapidly transitioning from research labs to daily utilize across sectors such as healthcare and transportation. In 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration approved 223 AI-enabled medical devices, a sharp increase from just six approvals in 2015.
On the mobility front, autonomous driving is shifting beyond the pilot stage: Waymo, among the largest operators in the US, now delivers more than 150,000 self-driving rides every week, while Baidu’s low-cost Apollo Go robotaxi service runs in multiple Chinese cities, the report added.
AI for businesses
Corporate investment in AI reached new highs in 2024, underpinned by strong productivity gains. Private AI funding in the US rose to $109.1 billion — nearly 12 times China’s $9.3 billion and 24 times the UK’s $4.5 billion.
Generative AI emerged as a key growth driver, drawing $33.9 billion in global private investment, up 18.7% from 2023, according to the report.
Enterprise adoption is also accelerating, with 78% of organisations reporting AI utilize in 2024, compared with 55% a year earlier. A growing body of research indicates that AI is improving productivity and also supporting reduce skill gaps, the report added.
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