Who is moving fastest on AI — and how do we know?
Every evening at 6 PM Eastern, NeuralNews asks Google Gemini to read the current web and score the pace of AI-related innovation in three blocs — the United States, the European Union and China — on a 0–100 index. The scoring is grounded: each day's snapshot ships with three real, openable sources per region drawn from the searches the model actually ran. The result is a timeline that grows by one point a day, so you can watch the race rather than guess at it.
Today's reading
Loading the latest grounded snapshot…
Grounding the latest index…
The growing timeline
Each evening's run adds one point per bloc. The chart plots the daily 0–100 index over time; hover a point to read its date and scores.
How the index is built
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Grounded scoring, once a day
At 6 PM Eastern a background job asks Gemini — through the Netlify AI Gateway — to assess the last ~30 days of AI activity in each bloc using live Google Search grounding: frontier model releases and research, investment and compute build-out, commercial adoption, talent depth, and the policy environment.
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Sources, not assertions
The score is only kept alongside the sources behind it. The three links shown for each region are pulled straight from the grounding metadata Gemini returns — the pages it actually consulted — so the model cannot invent a citation. Each region carries a grounded badge when real sources backed it.
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One point a day, preserved
The day's three scores are written to a single dated snapshot and appended to the timeline. The run is idempotent — one point per calendar day — so the chart is a clean, growing record of how the race shifts week over week.
What to keep in mind
- A grounded estimate, not a ledger. The index is a model's judgement of momentum from current coverage, blended across five facets. Read it as an informed signal, not an official statistic.
- Sources are the model's, openable by you. The three links per region are the pages Gemini grounded on. They may point through Google's grounding redirect, but each resolves to a real, readable source.
- The timeline starts after the first deploy. The daily run and its database activate once the site has a production deploy; the first point lands on the first evening run, and the line fills in from there.