In 2017 maybe. This chart shows last year’s Neurips accepted papers by country and institution (top 50). What is missing here is that the papers from American institutions also have mostly Chinese authors. Europe is sliding and Singapore has more papers than Canada.

There is a clear trend.

https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1pi64q0/papers_...

US is still winning because of their hardware dominance. Also they have astronomical budgets and much better financing. They throw money at an industry until they win. Whereas China throws lots of (educated) people at it. 38% of top AI researchers today have Chinese education and origin^. And hardware dominance will change in the upcoming years.

^ https://archivemacropolo.org/interactive/digital-projects/th...