The Chinese AIs threatening Silicon Valley

Passionate about music and a drummer himself, Yang Zhilin is a true fan of Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon, to the point of naming his artificial intelligence (AI) company after it in Chinese: Yuezhi Anmian. For international markets, the simpler name Moonshot was chosen, conjuring up vast ambition: "To aim for the moon." Time will tell if Moonshot will leave its mark on AI history the way David Gilmour's solos shaped the history of music. But its breakthrough is already raising serious questions in Silicon Valley.

The release of its latest AI model, Kimi 3, on July 16 dragged down the Nasdaq stock index in New York and provoked a wave of astonished commentary, as it rivaled American leaders Anthropic and OpenAI on several levels.

The company claims its AI can handle 2.8 trillion parameters. This would put it in direct competition with Claude 5, Anthropic's most powerful model, although the Silicon Valley company does not disclose such data. Kimi 3 is the first AI to reach this level of performance among those that have chosen an open model – meaning its source code can be downloaded, integrated and modified by outside developers – while major American players have opted for closed models.

You have 82.77% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.