• 2 min read
Moonshot’s Kimi 3 could challenge Opus 4.8
Financial Times reports Moonshot AI’s next model, Kimi K3, may match or beat Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 as it prepares a fresh funding round.
Image: Raul Ariano/Bloomberg (opens in a new window)
Moonshot AI’s next model, Kimi K3, is expected to perform on par with — or possibly surpass — Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, according to a Financial Times report citing anonymous sources.
The report says Kimi K3 will be the largest open-weight AI model to come out of China, with between 2 trillion and 3 trillion parameters, and that it could be released in the coming days.
Moonshot’s existing Kimi K2 models have already gained traction in the open-source AI market, scoring well on benchmarks and narrowing the gap with the latest frontier systems. Kimi K3 is reportedly aimed at pushing further against closed-source offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company is also said to be raising fresh funding at a $31.5 billion valuation. In May, Moonshot raised $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation.
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The timing matters. The report lands as companies debate whether premium closed models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic are worth the cost. Some industry leaders have raised concerns that AI labs could extract data submitted through products like ChatGPT and Claude.
That has helped strengthen the case for cheaper open models that companies can adapt themselves, including systems from DeepSeek, Z.ai, and Moonshot. As Chinese open models continue to improve, the gap with more expensive frontier models appears to be shrinking.
AI Editor
Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via TechCrunch
