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The analogy makes little sense. The USA was not in front of the USSR and Sputnik merely showed that. It is at this point that the Americans woke up, put a lot of effort and finally were able to surpass the Soviets during the Apollo missions.

China was never ahead of the USA in AI. So perhaps a more proper analogy is the Moon landing. In real history the side that lost the race never got its mojo back...

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I'm looking forward, towards the future, when I use "passing ... we need", need being key here as it implies something we don't yet have

I expect this to happen within 12-18 months, the differentiation has shrunk, many models are now sufficiently capable for most tasks

I understood that.

I was simply saying that when (not if) Chinese AI models will pass Americans, it will probably be game over and Americans will never catch up, let alone become leaders again.

Check the names of the researchers in the DeepSeek's latest paper. Full of Chinese names. Check the list of names in Google's paper. A very similar view. Anecdotal, but quite thought-provoking...

ah, ok, to add to this, China is persuading nobel laureates to "switch sides" (I imagine the current state of America had a part in pushing him away)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/science/nobel-winning-us-...

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