[strebler]

Agreed! From my perspective (computer vision), I can think of quite a few Chinese individuals who are true leaders in AI at this point (often working for US companies).

In fact, given both Hinton and Bengio's being Canadian and LeCun being French, I would say US really in the game in terms of producing "AI grandmasters" (assuming that's their definition of grandmaster). Krizhevsky was studying in Canada. DeepMind is European.

From both the research and industrial perspectives, China's education system has well prepared students for the field of deep learning - the rigorous / analytic nature has proven a massive benefit when dealing with such large models and datasets.