I am not trying to be elitist, just making an argument that more people != more innovation and smaller groups with more resources will produce better results than just making tons of people and hoping more random geniuses appear.

Said small group result of brain drain from very large group of Chinese, Indian / others. Billions of people are being filtered through foreign academic gauntlets - trying to find random geniuses from large pop base - before being drained / coordinated by US who does not have sufficient indigenous talent.

In current times China and India has a manufacturing industry the US can't compete with (tries to, with expensive hogwash like the Chip act).

Strictly speaking yes, more people != more innovation, but your examples are just not making sense. You are talking about the second and fifth largest economies worldwide.

US has 333m so:

China 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations

Africa 1.3b = 4X more innovations

India 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations

I don't think this holds true at all. Also the innovations you mentioned are from a time before China had a massive population compared to Europe. I am talking about the last few generations when the human population exploded. Why would an innovation from 1000 years ago have any relevance.