The race for "AI Supremacy" is over — at least for now.
The race for "AI Supremacy" is over, at least for now, and the U.S. didn't win. Over the last few weeks, two companies in China released three impressive papers that annihilated any pretense that the US was decisively ahead. In late December, a company called DeepSeek, apparently initially built for quantitative trading rather than 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. A couple weeks later, they followed up with a competitive ( though not fully adequate) alternative to OpenAI's o1, called r1. Because it is more forthcoming in its internal process than o1, many researchers are already preferring it to OpenAI's o1 (which had been introduced to much fanfare in September 2024). And then ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) dropped a third bombshell, a new model that is even cheaper. Yesterday, a Hong Kong lab added yet a fourth advance, making a passable though less powerful version of r1 with even less training data.
None of this means however that China won the AI race or even took the lead. American companies will incorporate these new results and continue to produce new results of their own.
