Compute Decides the AI Race — Why the U.S. Is Winning | Dmitri Alperovitch

Is the US already losing the AI race in China? And we're just too proud to admit it.

We're absolutely winning the AI race. All the leading models are coming from American companies. The OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok. They're by far leading in most of the major benchmarks. And the reason for that is not just talent. Obviously we have smart people, but so does China. China probably has a lot more, given their overall population. It's not the algorithms. The algorithms are pretty well known and many of them are. It's the compute. It's the AI chips. And we've got a stranglehold on AI chips because they're all being designed by American companies like Nvidia, Google, Amazon, amd, and they're being manufactured by one company, tsmc, in Taiwan, which is now prevented from exporting to China except for chips that we explicitly allow. That is a huge chokehold we have over the Chinese AI industry. We need to make sure that we continue to have a huge advantage in COMPUTE over China. The Huawei send chips that are sort of trying to be competitive to the to Nvidia chips are nowhere near as good. And by the way, we know from reverse engineering that the current batch of those chips has been manufactured illicitly by TSMC for them. And TSMC paid a fine for, for, for that export to Huawei. So they're incredibly reliant on us. And don't take my word for it, take the word of the Chinese AI companies. They're all saying that their progress is being constrained by inability to procure enough chips to drive further advancements in their models. So if we continue to strangle China on compute, we can absolutely win the AI race.