Breaking down the 2026 Stanford AI Index Report

Welcome to the Practical AI podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, x, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind the scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now onto the show. Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. Today, it's just Chris and I, my my cohost and I, in what we call a fully connected episode where we try to keep you updated with some of the things that are happening in the AI news and maybe, share some practical practical information that'll help you level up your AI and machine learning game. I'm Daniel Whitenack. I'm CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my co host, Chris Benson, who is a principal AI and autonomy research engineer. How are you doing, Chris? I'm doing good. I'm excited. This is we we're doing the episode we're doing today, we've done a number of times over the years. The Stanford AI index report, we get to go through it. It's always fun, and kind of kinda level set kinda how things are changing. And, gosh, I mean, things are changing Things are changing. So fast right now. Yeah. And, for context, so some of you may or may not have have listened to our previous episodes where Stanford Stanford's human centered artificial intelligence, center, institute. I forget, the exact of what they call themselves. But the human centered artificial intelligence effort there at Stanford, they published this AI index report, and they've been doing it for a number of years. We've talked about it before. If you're interested, we're we're not gonna go into, like, how it was created. It's very rigorous. It's very data driven. You can go back and listen to episode two seventy six. We had some representatives on from Stanford that actually shared, you know, what it is, how it's created. And I'm sure that's updated somewhat over time, but that would be a great context for today. But there's a lot of takeaways here, Chris, and I think, you know, maybe we'll get through all of them. We can try rapid rapid fire here to talk through some of these and share them with the audience and see see maybe our reaction to to some of these. Some of them were a surprise to me, to be honest, Chris. Yeah. There there always are. Because, I mean, we you kind of it it kind of brings you back after you know, with with the rigorous approach they have. We all have these perceptions. We're all watching the, you know, the news and …