While the current splashy “state of the art” models in terms of cognitive ability are American, IMO the real foundation for future AI is coming out of China these days. It’s not quite as smart but they’re focusing heavily on making AI training and inference cheaper in terms of compute (and therefore more efficient in terms of energy usage). It’s a mother-of-invention situation, sure - they’ve been cut off from the latest and greatest NVIDIA cards so they’re having to find ways to make do with less powerful hardware. But that’s going to be super important once AI is “good enough” for various real world tasks and the most powerful models aren’t needed for most activities.