While no one has waved an official checkered flag in the Sino-American race for AI supremacy, the markets are betting that the United States will prevail.
The chipmaker Nvidia recently became the world’s first $4 trillion company (and its CEO, Jensen Huang, has acquired global rock-star status). Microsoft, the biggest investor in OpenAI’s for-profit entity, is not far behind, with a valuation of $3.7 trillion.
But early leadership does not guarantee victory, especially when it comes to innovation. Hardly a day goes by without a new report about China’s extraordinary AI gains. The U.S. may have broken new ground with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but China’s DeepSeek shocked the world earlier this year with the cost and processing efficiency of its R1 large language model. In July, the Chinese startup Moonshot AI released its impressive Kimi K2 model, which outperforms Western competitors on several key benchmarks.
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