On July 16, Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based AI lab, released Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever built, at 2.8 trillion parameters, rivalling top American AI models. Within a day, Wall Street and Silicon Valley were treating it as a genuine rival to models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and Chinese AI stocks moved sharply on the news. This episode shows that the AI frontier is no longer a two-company story.
Kimi K3 arrives after 18 months in which Moonshot AI’s market position had eroded following DeepSeek’s rapid rise. The comeback rests on real architectural work, not just scale. K3 is built on two innovations called Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, designed to help information flow through longer sequences and deeper models, paired with a Mixture-of-Experts design with 896 experts, of which only 16 activate per token — so a 2.8-trillion-parameter model behaves, computationally, more like a much smaller one.
Published - July 23, 2026 08:01 am IST