> Which means that the US lead is all but gone.

You can see in this discussions the goalposts being actively moved to desperately create a notion that the lead is still there.

You even see people in this thread referring to imaginary wonder models that they expect US companies to have under development that are supposedly leaps and bounds more impressive, albeit the only reference there is to their existence is the commenters hopes and dreams.

I think people need to realize that there is no longer a cutting edge company that is expected to dominate, and among the multitude of AI companies in the field competition is so tight that no one would even be surprised if tomorrow some other company far away from the US was able to crank out the top performing model, or something like a small local model that outperforms mid/high tier frontier models. The local model alone would be a death sentence to US companies, who are still burning through 10x their revenue.