Just a day ago, a senior Anthropic executive claimed the U.S. still held a 6 to 9 month lead in frontier AI models, while calling Chinese model distillation adversarial. One day later, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 beat Claude Fable 5 on Frontend Code Arena. And the funniest part is that it is an open weight model.
So the whole 6 to9 month lead lasted about 24 hours. 🤣
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report
That investment graph is insane
Anything is possible with a sprinkle of fraud!
Totally not a bubble
Tbf they (Moonshot) claim it’s not as good as Fable overall. Fable is also held back by US government mandated guards. Anthropic could well be ahead by a lot in terms of research and maybe we just don’t have the full picture. But that puts them in an even worse spot because it would mean they’re already at the limit of what they can compete with in the market.
I think the big picture here is that the difference in quality is largely subjective at this point, while US companies are burning through orders of magnitude of cash which is obviously not sustainable. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of developing things in the open. Chinese open models benefit from the wisdom of an entire global research community while American engineers working on proprietary closed models are working in their own insular silos. It should be no surprise that the scientific community at large would pull ahead of these small teams. On top of that, doing research in the open amortizes the cost. Incidentally, this is exactly the same logic that led open source to dominate in recent years.
OpenAIs bet was that compute was the limiting factor. Sam Altman claimed that essentially no-one could obtain the level of compute necessary to develop something like GPT-4. Then Deepseek came out.
They’re still trying to make the original claim true because if they admit that they were wrong (or full of shit) it all comes crashing down, not just their companies but likely the economy as a whole.
It’s funny to watch them take the whole US economy down on a bluff.
The irony is that the original OpenAI thesis was correct. Use a datacenter to generate a frontier model, then distribute that AI openly.
Yeah, it was absolutely correct. Doing so was the only sensible things. Generate the model, release it with open weights. Instead they got greedy and now we have an arms race that is both dangerous, is crashing the economy and is devastating the environment.
It doesn’t hurt that American frontier models are phenomenally huge and cost an exorbitant amount per token in and out while the main source of real world value created by llms in the past year has been through agentic/harness/other words for massive context systems that show a real benefit from simply using more tokens.
Kimi K3 is not an open weight model, not yet, at least. They promised to releaso on July 27th, but it’s just a promise for now.
Why are there so many pictures of Sam Altman just Looking Like That?
If I were him I too would be in disbelief that people are buying my bullshit 24/7. What other expression could express this so well?
First bomb they’ve dropped in 50 years, wow.
check notes
Uhhhh not sure about bombing, but they went straight to clubbing people to death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020–2021_China–India_skirmishes
Lmao, how many people died? Honestly?
Aren’t you nonconfrontational?
Is clubbing people to death something you excuse, but only for China!?
How many people were killed in this brutal war that must have left countless dead in its wake?
A single death is too much, unless it is China.
What a goober.
Lmao, how many???
Stop pretending you give a duck.
“Clubbing people to death”
looks inside
"A fight between soldiers that could have spiralled into a war with guns but didn’t, and fewer people died than your average Friday night drunk driving pileup.
I am very glad cooler heads prevailed.
I doubt it. You seemed rather eager to clutch at your pearls when you implied tons of people had been clubbed to death.
If you don’t care about human life that is on you. Not sure what point you are trying to make, but you acting like a callous asshole isn’t the best look.
Can we please not write headlines like that when we’re on the verge of ww3 and literal bombs might be dropped on the US in the coming months?
Why not? Do you reall think it matters compared to the wankshite oozing out of their leader’s administrations’ mouths?
Because I thought China had literally bombed the US for a very tense moment before I finished reading the headline. Especially because of how the words wrapped. I didn’t need that stress.
China won’t bomb the US out of the blue. Start worrying about it once the US bombs them first.
Imagine a context where the reader is looking at the news for the first time that day. They think they missed news in the morning, perhaps the US starting aggressions, and now China has dropped another bomb.
I’m sure you can imagine such a scenario
The latest model is K2.7, I can decide what wrote the article. Is it more likely than an Ai did not know 2.7 existed or a journalist at Gizmodo is incompetent?
What do you mean by this? The latest model is K3, which was released yesterday.
Edit: ah I see the reference to K2.6
I did not know K3 was released until I started working today.
Ah gotcha, well you hit a good point anyway as they mention the prior latest model as K2.6, which does seem like a glaring error. K2.7 has been out for a month!
The latest model is k3 - its on banners on the moonshot website.
I found that out when I started to work that day.
yay
Kimi K3 looks insane but it’s also very expensive right now, hopefully that changes or I don’t see myself using it over the previous models
I mean if it’s going against Anthropic pricing that’s steal a good deal.
I thought Anthropic was heavily subsidizing their models but KimmyK is currently cheaper than Fable and is allegedly a pretty good deal. The only thing it’s missing is a comprehensive coding environment like Claude Code and the whole MCP and plugins ecosystem.
If Anthropic pulls Fable then a Chinese lab will be in front of them for the first time I can think of.
Kimi K3 works through OpenCode/Pi. It just got added to OpenCode Go but it’s practically unusable due to the cost (but they might negotiate it down soon), right now you have to use it through OpenRouter or official API, or Kimi Code subscription
I don’t get this. How can Chinese models be so performant if they are spending a tiny fraction of US investment. If this difference in investment is down to research investment, then there is something I’m not getting? And, if Chinese models are open, how is it that they can keep ahead of US? Finally, if all this is true, the investors in US AI business is dangerous territory … i would be running away from that inflated investment. Of course i barely understand AI …
Partly, the Chinese are distilling closed source models, and OpenAI and Anthropic’s attempts to stop this have only succeeded in making their outputs less transparent. Partly, the actual frontier of AI is currently mostly vibes and marketing, as everyone’s cheated the tests so badly that the only way to stay in the running is to cheat. Partly, that weve passed the point where even an honest evaluator could say which general purpose model is better than another, since their performance fluxuates wildly from task to task.
*fluctuates
Chinese schools do have reputation for being extremely difficult and China invests more in actual education.
Combine that with most US funding being a giant Ourobouros of AI companies funding eachother…
Very cheap electricity + a stronger education system + having access to the work of other open-source groups
This may explain why there are scrappers hammering the Internet using Alibaba cloud.
