Video generation models can now produce visually convincing footage, but Stanford's 2026 AI Index finds they still struggle to get the physics and consistency right. On VBench-2.0, which scores videos for human-aligned faithfulness to reality rather than visual polish alone, no model evaluated in early 2026 topped a total score of Veo 3 leads the VBench-2.0 video-realism benchmark at 66.7% — no AI video model tested tops 67%
VBench-2.0 is a benchmark that evaluates video generation models on their adherence to reality, scoring them across five dimensions including Human Fidelity, Creativity, Controllability, Physics, and Commonsense. The Stanford AI Index report for 2026 states that no model evaluated in early 2026 achieved a total score above 67% on this benchmark. Google DeepMind's Veo 3 led with a score of 66.7%.
Verified 2026-09-06
Track with InsiderWhy it matters
AI video can look real yet still break the laws of physics, so polish is not the same as accuracy.
More on Models
- AI models can now win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad, yet Stanford's 2026 AI Index found they still fumble a task most children master early. Across ClockBench's 180 clock designs and 720 questions, the top model, GPT-5.4 High, read analog clocks correctly only 50.6% of the time, versus 90.1% for humans
- After briefly nearly closing in 2024, the performance gap between the best closed-weight and open-weight AI models widened again on the Arena leaderboard. As of March 2026, Stanford's 2026 AI Index finds the top closed model leads the top open model by 3.3%, up from a 0.5% lead in August 2024
- Stanford's 2026 AI Index tracks how AI models perform on GPQA Diamond, a set of PhD-level chemistry and physics questions designed to resist Google searches. Mean model accuracy on the benchmark reached 93% in 2025, compared with an expert human validator baseline of 81.2% -- AI models now beat PhD-level experts by 12 points on GPQA Diamond
FREE · NO CARD
Facts like this, six days a week
The Daily Receipts on weekdays, The Weekly Brief on Saturday — six sourced facts a day by email, two more than the free site shows. Every one traced to the filing it came from. Free.
Get the free daily briefFree · No card · Unsubscribe anytime
Join now and you start with 100 Receipts on The Receipts Ledger — your first step toward a free year of Insider or Pro. How it works →
See today's issue →