2025 AI Index Report

by AIhub

08 May 2025

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The eighth edition of the Artificial Intelligence Index Report was published last month. Released on a yearly basis, the aim of the document is to provide readers with accurate, rigorously validated, and globally sourced data to give insights into the progress of AI and its potential impact on society. The co-directors of the 2025 report are Yolanda Gil and Raymond Perrault.

The report comprises eight chapters, covering: research and development, technical performance, responsible AI, economy, science and medicine, policy, education, and public opinion. The authors have picked out 12 key takeaways, and these are as follows:

AI performance on demanding benchmarks continues to improve. Performance of advanced AI systems on new benchmarks introduced in 2023 has increased sharply. AI systems also made major strides in generating high-quality video.
AI is increasingly embedded in everyday life. In 2023, the FDA (in the US) approved 223 AI-enabled medical devices, up from just six in 2015. On the roads, Waymo, one of the largest US operators, provides over 150,000 autonomous rides each week, while Baidu’s affordable Apollo Go robotaxi fleet now serves numerous cities across China.
Business is all in on AI, fueling record investment and usage, as research continues to show strong productivity impacts. In 2024, US private AI investment grew to $109.1, China’s to $9.3 billion and the UK’s to $4.5 billion. Generative AI saw particularly strong momentum, attracting $33.9 billion globally in private investment — an 18.7% increase from 2023. AI business usage is also accelerating: 78% of organizations reported using AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before.
The USA still leads in producing top AI models, but China is closing the performance gap. In 2024, US-based institutions produced 40 notable AI models, compared to China’s 15 and Europe’s three. While the USA maintains its lead in quantity, Chinese models have rapidly closed the quality gap: performance differences on major benchmarks such as MMLU and HumanEval shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024. China continues to lead in AI publications and patents. Model development is increasingly global, with notable launches from the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
The responsible AI ecosystem evolves, unevenly. AI-related incidents are rising sharply, yet standardized RAI evaluations remain rare among major industrial model developers. Among companies, a gap persists between recognizing RAI risks and taking meaningful action. In contrast, governments are showing increased urgency: In 2024, global cooperation on AI governance intensified, with organizations including the OECD, EU, U.N., and African Union releasing frameworks focused on transparency, trustworthiness, and other core responsible AI principles.
Global AI optimism is rising, but deep regional divides remain. In countries like China (83%), Indonesia (80%), and Thailand (77%), strong majorities see AI products and services as more beneficial than harmful. In contrast, optimism remains far lower in places like Canada (40%), the United States (39%), and the Netherlands (36%).
AI becomes more efficient, affordable, and accessible. Driven by increasingly capable small models, the inference cost for a system performing at the level of GPT-3.5 dropped over 280-fold between November 2022 and October 2024.
Governments are stepping up on AI, with regulation and investment. In 2024, US federal agencies introduced 59 AI-related regulations—more than double the number in 2023—and issued by twice as many agencies. Globally, legislative mentions of AI rose 21.3% across 75 countries since 2023, marking a ninefold increase since 2016.
AI and computer science education is expanding — but gaps in access and readiness persist. Two-thirds of countries now offer or plan to offer K–12 CS education, twice as many as in 2019.
Industry is racing ahead in AI, but the frontier is tightening. Nearly 90% of notable AI models in 2024 came from industry, up from 60% in 2023, while academia remains the top source of highly cited research.
AI earns top honors for its impact on science. AI’s growing importance is reflected in major scientific awards: Two Nobel Prizes recognized work that led to deep learning (physics) and to its application to protein folding (chemistry), while the Turing Award honored groundbreaking contributions to reinforcement learning.
Complex reasoning remains a challenge. AI models excel at tasks like International Mathematical Olympiad problems but still struggle with complex reasoning benchmarks like PlanBench. They often fail to reliably solve logic tasks even when provably correct solutions exist, limiting their effectiveness in high-stakes settings where precision is critical.