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# The AI Race Is Over—And Nobody Won
- URL: https://www.thedigitalspeaker.com/the-ai-race-is-over-and-nobody-won/
- Published: 2025-01-27T14:36:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-27T05:25:06.000Z
- Description: What if the “AI supremacy” battle was never about winning, but about who could lose the least?
- Author: Dr Mark van Rijmenam, CSP
- Tags: News, #seo-post-1

What if the “[AI](https://www.thedigitalspeaker.com/ai-keynote-speaker/) supremacy” battle was never about winning, but about who could lose the least?

China recently narrowed the gap with innovations like DeepSeek’s efficient LLMs, capable of achieving state-of-the-art results at a fraction of the cost, and ByteDance’s even cheaper alternatives.

Meanwhile, OpenAI faces mounting challenges: rising costs, dwindling technical leads, and an eroding reputation as competitors close in. The CHIPS Act, intended to slow China, has arguably backfired by accelerating its efficiency breakthroughs.

The industry now faces a fragmented future with diminishing margins and a lack of decisive leadership. Endless LLM development is unlikely to yield AGI, as neither chips nor rushed iterations will produce meaningful breakthroughs.

Is the AI race a distraction from solving deeper innovation problems, or do we need a paradigm shift to escape this technological arms race?

Read the full article on [Gary Marcus](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-race-for-ai-supremacy-is-over).

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