The AI race is like the nuclear arms race. Countries like China will devote an inordinate amount of resources to be the best - it may take a year or two, but in the grand scheme of things that is nothing.
And NVIDIA will lose its dominance for the simple reason that the Chinese companies can serve the growing number of countries under US sanctions. I even suspect it won't be long before the US will try to sanction any allies that buy Chinese AI chips!
China and Russia collectively have a talent pool dense enough to build future products and services the rest of the world uses, if China can produce comparative hardware for AI.
The Europeans invented the car and Ford mass produced it.
Yet, we see Ford as extremely innovative and revolutionary. I think we can draw lots of parallels between a 19th and early 20th century industrializing US and current China.
You may disparage TikTok as a Vine clone, but it redefined the state of the art for recsys algorithms. Google and Meta had to play catch-up with how quickly and how good TikTok is at discovering videos users find interesting out of the ocean of available content.
And NVIDIA will lose its dominance for the simple reason that the Chinese companies can serve the growing number of countries under US sanctions. I even suspect it won't be long before the US will try to sanction any allies that buy Chinese AI chips!