The race for ‘AI supremacy’ is over, at least for now, and the US didn’t win.

Over the last few weeks, two companies in China released three impressive papers that annihilated any pretence that the US was decisively ahead. In late December, a company called DeepSeek, apparently initially built for quantitative trading rather than large language models (LLMs), produced a nearly state-of-the-art model that required only roughly 1/50th of the training costs of previous models – instantly putting them in the big leagues with American companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, both in terms of performance and innovation.