Chinese AI startup Moonshot to launch model challenging Anthropic's lead

ft.com

7 pointsmerksittich3 comments

Paywall, but exclusive from the FT:

Kimi K3 launching in the coming days

Expected to exceed Opus 4.8 in capability

Moonshot raising new funds valuing company above 30bn

The FT is usually very trustworthy, so I don't doubt the actual information. However, the question is whether Kimi K3 was only benchmaxxed or actually is SOTA-ish in real use. If the latter is the case, it may be difficult for the big US AI labs to explain their valuations.

I am especially curious whether training (or at least inference) was indepdent of NVIDIA's stack - the article doesn't say. If so, it could have widespread ramifications (geopolitical and in the markets).

Moonshot use Alibaba cloud for training and inference, specifically using NVIDIA hardware, although Alibaba also make their own Zhenwu AI chips and clusters that run on them.

Other Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek and Ziphu (Z.ai - GLM) more heavily use domestic AI chips for inferences - specifically Huawei's Ascend chips.

So, China is no longer dependent on NVIDIA, but neither has it totally cut usage of (reliance on?) NVIDIA.

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