China's Moonshot AI chases 'DeepSeek moment' with much-hyped model

SHANGHAI: A model released Friday by Chinese startup Moonshot AI has fuelled buzz around the country’s tech prowess, as experts said it could rival some of the more advanced offerings from US labs.

Large language models underpin chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools with their ability to crunch huge amounts of digital data.

Moonshot AI’s “Kimi K3” is one of several from China growing in global popularity thanks to their lower costs and source code that programmers can customise.

Soon after its launch, Kimi K3 had topped a leaderboard for AI coding run by a platform called Arena created by UC Berkeley researchers.

That drew excitement from industry insiders, with some evoking a 2025 release from China’s DeepSeek that shook assumptions of US dominance in AI.

“Kimi K3 seems really good, closest to the frontier yet,” Ethan Mollick, a University of Pennsylvania professor and a leading voice on AI, said on X.

But it “cannot write a good murder mystery (though neither can any other model). That remains the jaggedest of frontiers” of AI development, he said.

“Sensing a violent market reaction to KimiK3… similar to DeepSeek moment,” tech writer and investor Kevin Xu wrote.

Beijng-based Moonshot AI said Kimi K3 was the world’s first open-source model of its size.

The more internal variables, or parameters, a model has, the better it can handle complex requests, and Kimi K3 has around 2.8 trillion.

Leading US players Anthropic and OpenAI do not release details of how many parameters their top models have.

‘Frontier-level’

“Kimi K3 demonstrated frontier-level performance across our evaluation suite, consistently outperforming other tested models,” Moonshot AI said.

However, overall performance “still trails the most powerful proprietary models” from Anthropic and OpenAI, the company said.

Hussein Abbass, a computing professor at UNSW Canberra, said Kimi K3 appears to be good at coding, “but it is still unknown how competitive it is across the whole range of tasks expected from foundation models”.

Should US rivals be concerned? “I wouldn’t say they need to be worried. But they shouldn’t be still,” to maintain their edge, Abbass told AFP.

He added that AI performance is “not just about the model” but also the hardware that runs it, along with data centres and supply chains.

Arena ranked Kimi K3 ninth worldwide for text queries. When AFP tried Kimi K3, it generated ideas for tech reporting that compared favourably with responses from other chatbots.

Kimi K3’s release follows that of other much-hyped Chinese AI models such as Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2.

It came during a major tech conference in Shanghai where President Xi Jinping on Friday urged international cooperation on AI governance.

The United States, which restricts the export to its rival of powerful microchips that can train and run AI, said earlier this year it was around eight months ahead of China in the strategic field.

But the Trump administration recently caused delays to the public release of top-end models from Anthropic and OpenAI, over concerns they could help hackers break into online systems.

“Post-Kimi K3 and open weights models getting closer to the frontier again, I wonder if Anthropic and OpenAI will be allowed to increase their release cadence by the government,” Mollick wrote.