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Jaime Sevilla reposted Cheryl Wu @cherylwoooo · 6h If we look at ECI, it doesn't seem like the gap between the US and China is closing yet. Chinese frontier models are still 4-5 months behind. But why do people feel Chinese models are catching up (or even, have caught up)? I think it's because they just started to satisfy most coding needs. Opus 4.6's release was the moment that I felt a huge jump in AI's coding capability and reliability. Kimi K3's ECI is 157, just surpassing Opus 4.6 (ECI 155). Maybe the ECI ~155 is a threshold above which AI is perceived useful and reliable. [embedded chart: "Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI)", y-axis Score (120 to 160), x-axis Release date (Jan. 2025 to July 2026), "50 Results"; legend by Country: United States of America (pink), China (blue), EU, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom (greyed). Stepped frontier lines per country. Labelled US points: o3, o3-pro, GPT-5 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.3 Codex, GPT-5.4 Pro, Claude Fable 5 (highest, about 162). Labelled China points: DeepSeek-R1, Qwen3.7-Max (about 157 at the right edge).]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Cheryl Wu (@cherylwoooo), reposted by Jaime Sevilla, arguing from Epoch's ECI that the US-China frontier gap is still about 4-5 months and that Chinese models only recently crossed a threshold (ECI ~155) where coding feels useful and reliable; attached is Epoch's ECI step chart with US lines above China lines.
epoch capabilities indexus-china ai gapkimi k3claude opus 4.6claude fable 5benchmarksai progress