The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

Summary

AI + ML The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now Hey Uncle Sam, if you thought GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable 5 were scary, get a load of Kimi K3 OPINION Every six months or so a Chinese model sparks a panic, calling into question America’s AI dominance. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 is the latest example. Recall when DeepSeek R1 shook markets early last year? Following a similar pattern, Moonshot’s latest model isn’t all that interesting apart from its benchmark performance, and at nearly three trillion parameters it's beyond the reach of most enterprises.For the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, the technology isn't as interesting as its national origin. A Chinese model can be dangled as a threat to national security — Anthropic’s fearmonger and chief Dario Amodei has said as much in the past. Last month the executive accused Alibaba, another prolific Chinese AI model dev, of using Claude to improve its Qwen family of models through a process called distillation. Those claims are rather rich coming from a man whose company just agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims over vacuuming up millions of pirated books to train Claude. Pot, kettle black much? With that said, the anxiety caused by Moonshot’s Kimi K3 does feel different. The model's size is a factor. At 2.8 trillion parameters, Kimi K3 is the largest open weights model ever built. The model’s girth certainly reinforces the idea that K3 is a frontier model. There are interesting architectural changes to the model, but from what we can tell, they aren’t at all related to the anti-China-AI rhetoric making the rounds right now.But let's talk about the benchmarks! We’ve been down this road before with Z.AI’s GLM family, MiniMax M-Series, Qwen, and of course DeepSeek. A new model is released alongside benchmarks that show it trading blows with OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google’s best.Kimi K3 is following that well-trodden path. Last week, Moonshot published a lengthy blog post packed with ben...