($) The AI Competition as a Football Game
At halftime: USA 29 - China 25
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If the US-China AI competition (or more accurately, “co-opetition”) were a football game (the American kind), what would the score be?
That was the framework, analogy, and angle that a Wall Street Journal feature article, published during the holidays, used to make this big question more relatable for a general audience, albeit a decidedly American audience. I participated in this feature, along with five others, sharing our individual assessment of what the score would be if this moment is half time. Here is what we each came up with, without knowing how the others would score the game.
Evidently, we all think Team USA is ahead! But you didn’t come to this newsletter for the overly simplistic headline. There are always more nuances and subtleties that underpin big, hard questions. While I have no idea how any of the other experts came up with their scores, the way I generated mine was a stack by stack scoring along the five layers of AI – energy, infrastructure capacity, chips/compute, foundational models, and applications. I then added each of the five scores up to produce my overall score: USA 29, China 25.
Here is how I scored each layer and why.