It was, perhaps, the worst-kept secret in the AI community.
In mid-July, online sleuths who obsessively track the internet for signs of new AI models started to whisper about the latest offering from Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi large language model: Something big was coming.
Moonshot AI’s latest model didn’t just live up to the hype—it raised the stakes.
On July 16, Moonshot debuted Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever released, and promised it could perform close to the level of Anthropic’s Fable 5—perhaps the most powerful publicly available model on the market today—at a fraction of the cost. Moonshot’s official benchmarks consistently rank K3 among the top three AI models; one independent benchmark from Arena.AI even pegged K3 as the best model currently available, ahead of Anthropic.
The launch was a triumph for the lab and its founder Yang Zhilin, a 34-year-old Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon alumnus—and Pink Floyd fan—who based his startup’s Chinese name on his favorite album, The Dark Side of the Moon.
