The Epoch Brief - June 1, 2026

Jun 01, 2026

In this week’s Epoch Brief:

Since January 2026, open-weight models have lagged the closed frontier by four months, with the gap widening slightly since we last measured it in October 2025.
Hyperscaler capital expenditures have quadrupled since GPT-4’s release, on track with our previous projection.
In the latest Gradient Update, Luke Emberson and Jaime Sevilla estimate trends in global inference capacity and find that token demand appears to be growing much faster than supply.

Research

In our latest Data Insight, researchers Luke Emberson and Jack Edwards find that the most capable open-weight models have lagged frontier closed models by approximately four months in the Epoch Capabilities Index since January 2026. The average 8-point gap is comparable to the performance difference between GPT-5 and GPT-5.5.

Hyperscaler capital expenditures came in on trend in Q1 2026, continuing the trajectory that projects spending of $770 billion this year and over $1 trillion in 2027. In February, we projected $155.1 billion in aggregate for Q1, and actual spending by our measure was $156.1 billion. This is up from $140.6 billion of spending in Q4.

In the latest Gradient Update, Luke Emberson and Jaime Sevilla model how many tokens the world could serve today. They estimate supply is growing 3-4× per year. While direct comparisons are difficult, it appears demand for tokens is growing much faster, at ~10× per year. This suggests a compute crunch is nearing, if not already here. Gradient Updates are informal, opinionated analyses that represent the views of individual authors, not Epoch AI as a whole.

We want to produce the most useful work on AI’s trajectory. To ensure we’re meeting your needs, we’d love your feedback.

→ Take our 5-minute survey.

You can opt in at the end to join our user panel for future compensated studies.

You can now listen to long-form content on the Epoch AI website, including reports, Gradient Updates, and topic overviews. Look for the play button.

We’re hiring across several roles. All positions are fully remote.

Designer to translate complex research into intuitive, engaging, and high-impact designs — primarily UI/UX and data visualization work.
Researchers and Senior Researchers to lead new projects across our expanding teams.
Data Scientist (Contract) to assist with our AI research efforts, including reviewing technical literature, tracking benchmark data, and analyzing AI models, data centers, and companies.

Applications are rolling, so apply soon!