Depending on what the goals are. If Silicon Valley had the goal of monopolizing AI market share, I think this goal won’t happen. If the goal is having monopoly over user data storage, they are in advantage, due to the social network monopoly in the West. If they want to have a viable infrastructure for AI and power generation, China won this one. If they want to have a monopoly over AI chip production, China is about to develop their own infrastructure and this monopoly won’t last long.
However, I am pretty sure China is way ahead in the next technology wave, which is neurotech and human machine interface.
The winner of the AI race, just like with the Space Race, will be the nation that dominates the popular historical narrative after the fact.
That nation will decide what arbitrary milestone achievement will be the one that counts as ‘winning’, and they’ll pick one that favours them, no matter how many milestones the USSR reached first before that.
Already did. Especially in the non-generative AI, and i would argue that developing open source free models already put them in a competitive position against US proprietary models and when the AI bubble burst Chinese ones will remian and their development will continue.
I don’t know if China is interested in ‘winning’, but they are definitely up there. They found ways to offer comparable models to western tech companies despite the sanctions on computing power, showing that you don’t necessarily need as many latest GPUs as you can get your hands on to train a model.
Right now all the top-downloaded open-source/open-weights models are Chinese. The humiliation was so severe that US companies started pointing out “it’s actually open weights not open source 🤓” when they don’t do either lol. But I’m being a bit hyperbolic.
Regardless China is actually, right now, using AIs in industry, agriculture and medicine. Some of the basic pillars of a society. Agriculture is especially interesting considering their history, and you might think “but how do you use AI to help with agricultural yields?” and I’m thinking the same thing, hence why I think it’s important to study what they’re doing.
Meanwhile the west is still trying to find its niche for it and failing. They don’t want to let China control AI so they keep pumping money into western companies, right now it’s all about agentic and there is merit to it but I don’t think it alone justifies the close-to-a-trillion-dollars they’re putting into it. I don’t think Anthropic, the leader in agentic right now (in the west at least), is anywhere close to becoming profitable with just that. It’s still kinda niche.
If i can risk sounding uniformed…race to what?
For fusion technology there is a race to a goal, a sustainable reaction that outputs more energy than put in.
For the space race it’s had a definite goal of the moon (although that didn’t mean anything scientifically)
For atomic elements, if you had enough evidence to say you had it then you had it.
Ai? What’s the finish line?
It’s the race to build artificial general intelligence that all of the US capitalists can pay for to replace all workers, hack and destroy all other anti-imperialist countries, and then have it kill and oppress all of the poors in the world forever.
I made a previous post on this topic:
There are only 2 ways the worker-capitalist contradiction can ever be solved:
- communism
- exterminism (from Peter Frase’s Four Futures), where the capitalists finally fulfill their dream of automating everything and can genocide all the unneeded workers.
It’s quite important we bring about revolution before option 2 becomes viable.
There’s also the AI 2027 paper, which theorizes a world in which OpenAI and associates are able to create a self-improving AI for the USA by the year 2027. At that point, the AI will be able to improve its own intelligence ad infinitum until it becomes a god and can immediately defeat any and all other countries by hacking their infrastructure instantly or planning amazing color revolutions, thereby guaranteeing U.S. world domination forever.
US capitalists fear that if China can get to a comparable level of AI at the same time, then they won’t be able to delete China with their own AI.
The only race I can think of is the race to AI being profitable. Right now it’s just a money and energy pit.
deleted by creator
I think China already disrupted the race enough to say they won.
Tech companies operate under the strategy of offering a subsidized service with the goal of capturing a monopoly share of the market, basically scale and worry about profiting later.
The plan was working as intended until the deepseek bomb dropped, and correct me if i am wrong since i am not an expert on the topic, they developed a way to train models with near same performance using data distilled from ChatGPT itself! This allowed deepseek to offer their API at several hundred times cheaper price on the already subsidized ChatGPT price, forcing openAI to drop their already unprofitable prices and capturing a share of the market instantly, there is also Qwen doing their thing.
The important thing imo is that the Deepseek method means that there will always be some degree of “cannibalizing” between these companies, when one invests a lot into training a model another one can copy it with a fraction of the investment.
https://www.fudan.edu.cn/en/2025/0417/c344a145016/page.htm
Yes.
Once they solve integration and scaling problems, they have the hardware ingredients for an ASI.
There is no AI race as such. It is a narrative used to justify LLM normalization and regulatory capture of the LLM industry.
If not technologically, then definitely in its implementation.
China is winning multiple AI races that matter far more than LLMs
What even would it mean to “win” the “ai” race? AI is a broad and almost meaningless term. The space race had a concrete end which was getting to the moon. What’s the equivalent in this context?
The space race wasn’t aimed at the moon, we decided to call that the finish line after the fact because it was the only metric that allowed us to declare ourselves the winner
First country to rack up 200 LLM-related family annihilations.
They have copper 3D printers producing rocket engines and adaptive robotics manufacturing lines, so once those technologies are truly ready for export I’ll say they’ve really won the CEM & contact-rich manipulation model race.
Rather than waiting for some kind of benchmark look at how it changes conditions. Is the west even running? Not the moon, more important, the “developing” economies
my understanding of the ai race as the idea that at some point a breakthrough in AI is going to give a permanent advantage in the ability to make decisions that benefit a country and once that happens it will be next to impossible to lose that advantage as the next best will never catch up.
how true that is remains to be seen i guess but it does seem to be the prevailing theory by those fueling the race around the world. I think this only makes sense in a capitalist POV though, unless the advantage that is given is so great that all other countries become subservient with no hope.
in any case i would bet on China to win if the race is what they think it is. if China does not win, then god help us all.
the ability to make decisions that benefit a country
For who though is always the question of decision-making. The US’s focus is making decisions that benefit the hyper wealthy and exploit marginalized groups. China’s focus is making decisions that benefit regular people, that keep the capitalists under control and the imperialists at bay, and that work to transition to socialism and then communism.
I think this only makes sense in a capitalist POV though
Yes, I think the idea of AI “saving us” in some way is an expression of capitalist realism (“it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”). In AES projects, they didn’t need AI to dramatically improve quality of life and China’s use of it now is more measured, as far as I can tell, than the haphazard western implementation, more cognizant of the need for it to do tangible social good. But in the heart of capitalist empire, when people are convinced there’s no alternative system because “communism ebil”, it makes a kind of sense they’d turn to the latest tech development as a hope for escape.
But in the heart of capitalist empire, when people are convinced there’s no alternative system because “communism ebil”, it makes a kind of sense they’d turn to the latest tech development as a hope for escape.
Exactly! I think in the ‘western’ viewpoint it is all a zero-sum game which is where any of this makes any sense at all. That is highly unlikely to be the case imo though.
I think it only makes sense in a European worldview. The idea that the decision making problems are algorithmic or mathematical in nature and this abstractable, universalizable, and permanent is a fantasy.
The more abstraction a higher order system has, the less it is able to respond to changes in the lowest order systems. Highly effective mathematical abstractions for decision making will solve a lot of problems in the short term, mostly problems that exist due to inefficiencies that mask solution spaces from us currently.
But once those short-term problems are solved and the inefficiencies in solution searching are gone, the hard problems will still remain.
permanent advantage in the ability to make decisions that benefit a country and once that happens it will be next to impossible to lose that advantage as the next best will never catch up.
That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen lol, current AI is a great assistant and can have near perfect knowledge on stuff hitherto, but when treading unchartered waters it’s not going to come up with a novel solution.
everything seems that it wasn’t a race from the beginning…usa is dropping money in a furnace without any visible improvement
I’m not sure what the terms of the “race” are. If it’s developing a general intelligence, then nobody will win because LLMs can’t do that. If it’s about automating things in the real world, China already won that race in the past decade without AI and they seem to still be in the lead. If it’s about making the biggest, fastest, most expensive graphics cards, China is still behind on that one for the foreseeable future, but the gap is closing fast. If it’s about using machine learning/nueral networks for other tasks besides LLMs, I think American research institutions will remain on top of that for the foreseeable future, but we did serious damage to our investments in that kind of not-immediately-profitable research and it won’t be apparent for a decade or so what the extent of the damage is.
The short answer is yes, I guess. In general the US is going to lose more and more races.
If AI even has a finish line, I have no idea where it is. The internal combustion engine is only now starting to run out of gas, not because it can no longer be improved, but because we will stop bothering to.
