Why China is giving away its best AI models
Silicon Valley has spent much of the past week on red alert, digesting the arrival of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, a Chinese AI model that can allegedly beat some of the best systems built by US companies at a fraction of the cost.
Its performance alone would have been enough to intensify the rivalry between the US and China. But Moonshot’s plan to release the model’s weights for free — and its clear targeting of US users — has fueled deeper unease about whether closed American models can continue to dominate as increasingly capable open alternatives enter the market.
Open-weight models give developers far greater control than proprietary systems, allowing them to inspect how the AI functions, run the AI locally on their own infrastructure, customize the systems, and build new products without depending on a single provider. They’re often a lot cheaper, too. That raises an obvious...
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