中国AI模型Kimmy K3震动硅谷与华盛顿

Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. The battle for AI dominance between the US and China has escalated sharply over the past few weeks after the surprise release of a new Chinese AI model took the tech world and Washington by storm.

Kimmy K3 which is a very powerful model

Kimmy K3 model. This company's AI model known as Kimmy K3. For the last 3 days, I've said Kimmy K3 many times.

Kimmy K3 developed by Chinese startup Moonshot AI.

Kim K3 is really making waves because it stacks up so well against offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are among the most powerful AI models in existence.

Mark Anderson is Bloomberg's Asia technology editor based in Hong Kong. And all of this developed by a Chinese AI company that has access to far less compute and far less resources than deep pocketed American competitors. Kimmy K3 trails only OpenAI's GPT 5.6 and Anthropics Claude Fable 5. So it's the third most powerful model on the market today. Within hours of its release, Kim K3 sent shock waves through global markets, triggering memories of the deepseek panic in early 2025.

Remember, chip stocks fell into a bare market Friday in

because investors are now really reassessing whether or not all that capex by Samsung and SKH is that really justified given that China is doing it better and cheaper. Once markets settled, the questions began about how Moonshot built Kimmy in the first place.

It raises the question about if this was done illegally and in a violation of those export controls.

Did it use banned Nvidia chips? Did it steal proprietary data from American rival Anthropic?

This is what the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Michael Katzios. He is saying that Moonshot allegedly developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large-scale distillation against US models.

And most importantly, what is yet another lowcost Chinese AI model mean for the race between the US and China for global AI supremacy?

I think the K3 moment tells us that the race is much closer than people previously thought. I think that China is about 6 months behind the US.

That's not a lot of time.

Which is not a lot of time. But it's also bringing a challenge to this perception that only American AI, only proprietary AI can be frontier, can be the most cutting edge AI. It's challenging this idea that America owns the most advanced AI models in a really exciting way. Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Juan Ha. Every week, we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons, and businesses that drive this evershifting region.

Today on the show, what we know about Moonshot's Kimmy model, what the company's stunning rise means for Silicon Valley's tech giants, and the highstakes AI arms race between the US and China. Kimmy K3's launch didn't just rattle markets. Overnight, it became clear that China is intent on rewriting the rules of the global AI race. It's also upending long-held assumptions about how this technology will evolve. The prevailing view in the AI industry used to be that the companies with the biggest budgets, largest data centers, and access to the most advanced chips would lead.

But with the release of DeepSeek's R1 model last year and Moonshot AI's latest offering, that narrative is being challenged. I want to get just a little geeky with you. Can you take us under the hood about this model and what's special about it?

Sure, Geeky is good. Um, basically it's got a really huge brain. So, by brain we mean parameters. It's got 2.8 trillion parameters.

And what are parameters?

I would describe parameters as the size of the model's brain. So, it's essentially the amount of information that is stored inside an artificial intelligence model. The bigger the brain, the more information that is stored in it. the more information can be processed, you know, it's it's really as simple as bigger is better and 2.8 trillion is certainly a very large number, which is essentially on par with the latest offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Kim K3 isn't just notable for its brain size. It's also remarkable for the way it's being shared. While models like GPT and Claude largely operate behind closed doors, K3 was released to the public last month as an openweight model, meaning anyone, a researcher, a startup, a government can access it.

So basically, an openweight model can be downloaded and customized. Users can look and see essentially what I would describe as the recipe of the model. It can see how the model works at a level that proprietary AI doesn't offer. Is that the same as open source?

Open source goes one step further. Open source, I would describe it as a kitchen. Open source allows you to see all of the steps behind the recipe that the entire process by which the model was built. There are other openweight AI models on the market like those from Deepseek. But right now, Kim K3 is the biggest and size isn't its only selling point. Kim K3 comes with something called a massive context window. A feature Mark says is becoming increasingly important as AI models take on more complex tasks.

The context window is essentially the temporary memory of an AI model. So it's the AI model's ability to retrieve information in a timely manner. I think we've all probably used Gemini or Chat GPT and tried to ask for things like give me this recipe or what time should I put my toddler to bed. But when it comes to running a really complex task like build an entire app from scratch, it can take much, much longer. Most AI models have limited working memory.

As a conversation or document gets longer, they can start to lose track of what came earlier. Imagine trying to talk to someone who can only remember the last 10 sentences you said. Kimmy K3, on the other hand, has a context window big enough to process nearly 800,000 words in a single prompt. That's like several fulllength novels at once. This makes it extremely powerful for long legal documents, code bases, or research papers.

And K3 isn't just powerful, it's also remarkably cheap to run. According to a benchmarking site that is widely regarded throughout the industry called artificial analysis, the cost of running Kimmy K3 is far cheaper than running the latest offering from Anthropic or OpenAI. The most expensive model at the moment is Anthropic's Clawed Fable 5 uh which costs about $2.75 per task according to artificial analysis. If you look at Kimmy K3, I think it's about a dollar, something like 95, but it offers a very similar performance, and I think that is a key reason for its popularity.

K3's release has thrust its parent company, Moonshot AI, and its founder, Yang Chilling, into the spotlight. When open AI shocked the world with chat GPT, everyone was looking to Yang and Moonshot as China's best chance at matching that technology. And really, he was seen as the poster boy of Chinese AI up until Deepseek shocked the world last January. And basically, ever since then, he's toiled in their shadow. But this release of Kimmy K3 has brought him back to prominence.

It's brought him back to the forefront of the conversation about Chinese AI. Now, the last time we saw this level of attention and certainly headlines about a Chinese AI, it was Deepseek in 2025. Is this another deepseek moment? You know, deepseek 2.0 for China.

For me, it's not. For me, the deepseek moment was really establishing that China was much much closer than 5 years behind the US in the global technology race. You know, before Deep Seek's R1 model was released last January, people really did believe that the US had a yearslong head start in AI and Deepseek completely upended that perception, cut it down to just a few months. I think we are now in a place with Moonshot where people are just expecting more of these breakthroughs and it's not as surprising as the Deep Seek moment was.

But it is certain