Moonshot AI has temporarily paused new subscriptions.
CN-STR / AFP via Getty Images
One of China's biggest AI players is struggling to cope with its newfound success.In a Sunday X post, Chinese startup Moonshot AI wrote that its recently released Kimi K3 model has "received far more love" than expected, and its GPUs were feeling the strain."Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity," the company wrote. "To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members."It added that existing subscribers would not be affected and that it was adding capacity as fast as possible to "reopen new subscription spots in batches."Moonshot AI announced the launch of Kimi K3 on Friday, calling it "Open Frontier Intelligence" and promising to rival models from Anthropic and OpenAI. The company said Kimi K3 has "frontier intelligence" for tasks like coding, knowledge work, and reasoning.The company said it plans to release a full open-weight model on July 27. That means developers will be able to download the model's trained parameters and run, modify, or build upon it themselves.In its X post, Moonshot AI added that it is testing another method to use its compute more effectively — splitting membership tiers into two plans. The two plans are "Kimi Membership for Kimi Web, App, and Work; and Kimi Code Membership for coding workflows."
