Hangzhou-based Alibaba Group and Beijing-based start-up Moonshot AI have both released models they claim reach near-parity with the top releases from US tech groups.
Moonshot released its Kimi K3 model with 2.8 trillion parameters on 16 July, making it the largest currently available open-weight model – meaning it can be freely downloaded and modified.
The company said Kimi K3 “consistently” outperformed top releases from other firms, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and GLM-5.2 from Beijing-based Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai.
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Narrowing performance gap
