New Delhi, Aug. 26 -- AI leaders like OpenAI and DeepMind see themselves as being in a race to build artificial general intelligence (AGI): a model capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can. At the same time, the US and Chinese governments see the AI race as a national-security priority that demands massive investments reminiscent of the Manhattan Project. In both cases, AI is seen as a new form of 'hard power,' accessible only to superpowers with vast computational resources.

But this view is both incomplete and increasingly outdated. Since the Chinese developer DeepSeek launched its lower-cost, competitively performing model earlier this year, we have been in a new era. No longer is the ability to build cutting-edge ...