Elon Musk has picked his winners of the AI race. The list includes the name of a tech company that will leave everyone behind “in the West”, a country that will win on Earth and a company that will will AI race in space – essentially a three-way split. Musk made the prediction about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) over a candid post about Google‘s Gemini 3.0 AI model. It started with Bindu Reddy, CEO of AI startup Abacus AI, who posted on the state of Google’s AI efforts. She said, “Gemini 3.0 didn’t quite work out and most of us are still stuck with 2.5”, expressing frustration at what she sees as Google’s inability to fully capitalise on its resources.“Sometimes I don’t get it — what’s preventing Google from ditching all the side hustles and training 100 models from 100 teams in parallel? Pick the model and team combination that produces a decent model. That way, they will at least stay in the AI race,” she wrote, questioning why a company of Google’s scale has not simply thrown everything at the problem.
Elon Musk’s three-part prediction on AI race
The post caught Musk’s attention, and his reply was brief, but it landed like a grenade.“Google will win the AI race in the West, China on Earth and SpaceX in space,” he said.Reddy’s response to Musk acknowledged the China prediction with a mix of resignation and concern. “I am afraid you may be right about China,” she replied — before poking at the logic of his broader claim. “How does Google win in the West if China wins the Earth?,” she asked.
Why Google and China are in the conversation
Google has been one of the most aggressive investors in AI, pouring billions into large language models (LLMs), Google Cloud infrastructure, and its Gemini model family. Gemini 3.0 has been praised by analysts and some CEOs like Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff. China, meanwhile, has been rapidly closing the gap with Western AI developers, as per Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The country is working on a growing roster of competitive homegrown models backed by government funding and a vast data ecosystem.For example, DeepSeek emerged as a credible rival to American AI companies, and most recently, Seedance 2.0 by TikTok-parent company ByteDance made moves.Earlier this week, some American senators seem very upset with the AI app as they sent a letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo, calling for a halt to the new version of ByteDance’s AI app, Seedance. It generates videos of real people and licensed characters, raising copyright and intellectual property concerns in American circles. The Senators slammed Seedance 2.0 as “the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs.”