No they’re not. They’re fancy autocomplete. Statistics engines. Extremely more expensive but not particularly more capable Markov chains.

Them being marketed as AI doesn’t make them AI, it just makes them a scam.

The what race? No one has been working on AI for a while… if he means LLMs and similar generative models there’s only the race to see how long it takes for the models to be so poisoned by being trained on their own slop that they no longer can produce the illusion of giving useful results (seems like the current generation is almost there, already giving diminishing results), and the race to extract as much money as possible from the economy before the first one ends and the bubble pops…