Market AnalysisJul 20, 20262 Min

How China’s Moonshot AI has shaken the tech world with the Kimi K3 launch?

Chinese start-up Moonshot AI caught the world’s attention last week when it released China’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) model to date, Kimi K3.

Kimi K3 is an open-weight AI model, which means that developers can download its model parameters and customize them for their own use.

Moonshot AI claimed that the large language model had capabilities that closes the gap with leading US offerings and, in fact, surpasses OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s most capable systems on certain benchmarks.

This makes the launch of this model a significant milestone amidst an intensifying race between the US and China to establish their AI supremacy.

What’s even better is that Moonshot AI has priced K3 at $15 per million output tokens, the bits of information processed and generated by a large language model. That makes it cheaper than Fable 5, which costs $50 for the same level of output, according to a report.

No wonder, the AI model saw an overwhelming demand for tech users over the weekend, triggering a temporary halt on new subscriptions.

In a social media post on Monday, Moonshot AI said: “To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we’re temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members.” The decision comes in light of an unprecedented spike in demand over the last 48 hours, it added.

Moonshot AI also revealed its plans to expand capacity and reopen new subscription spots in batches. The company plans to launch two more focused membership plans. These will help allocate computing resources more accurately and ensure a stable user experience.

Listing on cards?

In another major move, Moonshot AI also told investors that it was planning to list in Hong Kong within six months.

According to a report, the company has officially distributed the shareholder resolution to its investors for the Hong Kong listing. The initiation of the notification process indicates an IPO could happen as soon as within the next half a year.

The report said that Moonshot AI was also finishing a new private fundraising round that could value the company at more than $30 billion. Though the final terms of the fundraising have not yet been completed.

Moonshot AI, which was founded by Yang Zhilin in early 2023, first came into limelight with its Kimi K2 model that gained recognition for its ability to process long documents through a large context window.

Since then, Moonshot AI has expanded into AI coding, research tools and autonomous agents while securing backing from Alibaba, Tencent and other major Chinese investors.