By Tracy Qu and Raffaele Huang
China's Moonshot AI has launched an artificial-intelligence model it says outperforms some cutting-edge U.S. systems, the latest sign that Chinese labs can rival American counterparts in critical technology frontiers.
Moonshot said Friday that it planned to fully open-source the model, called Kimi K3, by late this month, where people will be generally free to download and adapt. With 2.8 trillion parameters dictating its decision-making, Kimi K3 is the world's biggest open-source model, according to the Beijing-based startup.
AI system parameters work like brain cells: the more a model has, the more knowledge it can store, making the count a shorthand for a model's capabilities. Some companies make the information public, while others keep it private. Anthropic, for example, hasn't disclosed how many parameters its models have, though external researchers estimate that Claude Opus 4.8, released in May, has more than 1.5 trillion parameters.
The Moonshot release, which has surprised many in Silicon Valley with its advanced capabilities, will buoy views that Chinese AI labs are closing in on U.S. rivals at an accelerating pace. Another recent model launched by Beijing-based Z.AI, the GLM-5.2, outperformed several leading U.S. systems on some benchmarks, particularly in coding.
