🇨🇳🇺🇸 The AI race has only two real contenders and the data makes it obvious

Look at the NeurIPS authorship map and you basically get a world economic forecast. China commands roughly half. The US takes the other half. Europe, by choice or by drift, has stepped off the field.

Where the strengths lie:
• The US leads in frontier AI labs, cutting-edge chips, capital at trillion-dollar scale, and the world’s largest software market.
• China leads in robotics, hardware manufacturing, and fast deployment cycles.
• These positions can shift, but the pattern is clear: there is no meaningful third pla