Cover of AI Superpowers

AI Superpowers

Kai-Fu Lee

China and America are not building the same AI future because they do not execute the same way.

Written in 2018, and still the cleanest statement of the deployment thesis: America leads research; China wins on execution tempo, data density, and market brutality. The mechanism Lee described is the one that later produced DeepSeek — advantage lives in deployment structure, not just lab quality.