Why we built it, what we assume, and how scoring works
A leaderboard that ranks the world's best AI models by both intelligence and cost efficiency—then shows you which country is winning.
Use it to: Compare models side-by-side, find the best value for your use case, and see how the US-China AI race is unfolding in real time.
AI is a race—one that increasingly looks like a two-front contest between the United States and China. In a fast-moving landscape, debates tend to collapse into benchmark cherry-picking or price-only arguments. We wanted a simple, repeatable way to answer: “How strong is a model?” and “How much leverage do you get per dollar?”
This site turns that race into something you can track: who has the most capable models, who has the best economics, and who can place more models into the global Top 10.
Frontier capability, research leadership, and premium performance.
Scaling, iteration speed, and cost-efficient deployment at volume.
The dashboard stays explicit about assumptions. If you disagree, you can still use the raw IQ and Value components directly.
Capability-focused (90%) with value efficiency (10%). Capability is computed via a two-pass scoring pipeline so that models aren’t penalised for skipping benchmarks their peers chose to publish.
National totals sum the Unified Scores for models from each nation in the combined leaderboard (sorted by Unified). This rewards both peak performance and depth of high-performing models.
Cheap output is not “value” if the model cannot solve hard problems.
A strong model becomes more powerful when it’s also affordable to deploy at scale.
Pass 1 picks the Initial Top 10 with participation weighting; Pass 2 then rescores every model as a flat average over only the benchmarks ≥ 8 of those 10 actually reported. Sparse benchmarks (fewer than 4 cohort models reporting) are dropped entirely.
Value uses total cost (Input + Output) with linear normalization inside the Unified blend.
The headline national scores are based on the Top 10 filter, by design.
Benchmarks and pricing shift. Treat rankings as a periodic audit, not a permanent leaderboard.
Only benchmarks with 2+ model participation are included. All 18 active benchmarks (by participation count):
Scores and pricing are sourced from each model's linked reference pages. Vendor pricing can change quickly; this is why the dashboard is presented as an audit at a point in time.
Not affiliated with any model provider. No guarantees are made about correctness, completeness, or fitness for any purpose.