alt Hacker NewsTop 3 CS programs still seem to be in the US. MIT, Stanford, CMU.
The US has its geography, weather, etc. which are not going away.
China has massive scale industrial espionage and learnt a lot by being the cheap place where things are made and stealing western companies processes. They also invested a lot in education and naturally they have a lot of smart people. I still think that as long as they have an oppressive regime the really smart people will prefer not to be there since the second you become successful you also become a threat to the regime. Their work culture is also pretty toxic.
https://monitor.icef.com/2025/11/there-were-more-internation...
It's hard to predict long term but the US has a culture of innovation going back maybe hundreds of years, it has relative freedom, it has capital to invest, land and resources, and overall it has good people (and crazy people which was always true). Most of the conditions that made the US what it is are still there and most of the conditions that made places like Europe unable to compete are also still there. The US is a lot more diverse than it used to be as well.
Replies
> It's hard to predict long term...
It's not hard at all if you can interpret charts and can observe trends. You do yourself no favors by intentionally misunderestimating an adversary, to borrow a Bushism.
> the US has a culture of innovation going back maybe hundreds of years
Not many hundred, considering the US declaration of independence was in 1776 and there were some adjustment after that. Perhaps some decades?
> and crazy people which was always true
The experiment with giving the crazy people unchecked power over every lever of government is new, however.
This is perhaps a shrewd move against China: they can't steal technology and scientific advances from the US if there aren't any to steal.