Moonshot AI recently released Kimi K3, a more advanced open-weight large language model that it said outperforms all rivals except for Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on overall capability. | Bloomberg
Aug 6, 2026
The “Dark Side of the Moon” has been in clear view for some time now. I’m referring to the Chinese name for Moonshot, the Beijing-based lab dubbed after the Pink Floyd album, which shocked the world recently with the release of its massive artificial intelligence model last, briefly spooking markets.
But if you’re calling Kimi K3 a new “DeepSeek moment,” it only means that you haven’t been paying attention.
Many observers, myself included, said the same thing last year when Moonshot released its predecessor, Kimi K2 Thinking. It similarly closed the gap with U.S. AI labs at the time, causing consternation about what cheap Chinese AI could mean for America’s dominance. But since then, Moonshot has become a pillar for innovation in Silicon Valley. Cursor, the coding startup that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is acquiring for some $60 billion, built its product using a Kimi model as a base, the company acknowledged in March.
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