In the six months since China stunned the world with DeepSeek, its progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to impress. In July alone three labs unveiled top-flight ai models, matching and in some cases even beating America’s best. The bosses of America’s leading modelmakers say that advanced ai, able to outperform the average human at all cognitive tasks, could be just a few years away. The race is not just commercial, but geopolitical: the country that gets to superintelligence first would enjoy mighty military advantages, too.
