The release of China’s Deepseek R1 model last year, which rivalled many US large language models but was trained at a fraction of the cost, seemed to kick-off a new realm of competition between the US and China. Luke is joined by Robert Gilhooly, Senior Emerging Markets Economist at Aberdeen, to discuss the nature of the AI race between the US and China, who is currently winning, whether government strategies around things like export controls and energy policy can help determine who the winner might ultimately be, and whether even framing the contest as a “race” with a single “winner” is the right way to think about how the technology and policy is likely to evolve.