The article implies that the US is still ahead.

The whole point of the article is that it’s not (or at least not enough for the disparity we’re seeing).

The root comment of this thread implies that the US is still ahead.

No, it implies it was ahead at one point (which is obviously true)

Its investment lags far behind America’s. Its models do not

Their models appear only fractionally less powerful owing to this frugality. K3, an advanced model launched last month by Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup, is 95% as clever (on widely used benchmarks) as Fable 5, a frontier model from Anthropic, another top American lab. It is also 70% cheaper to use. On August 3rd Alibaba, a Chinese tech giant, released a model which reportedly scored among the world’s best by some measures.

See also: Chinese models showing up at or near the top in leaderboards. Admittedly it seems I was wrong about China being clearly ahead, but what little gap exists is far from enough to explain the disparity in investment efficacy.