Moonshot AI readies to release Kimi K3 for public download
Kimi K3 rivals OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest models across various benchmarks.
Moonshot is gearing up to make the world’s largest open-weight AI model available for public download, after initial interest overwhelmed the company’s systems.
The Chinese AI start-up is due to release the Kimi K3’s weights on Monday (27 June), enabling users to fine tune and run the model locally for free.
Moonshot unveiled K3 earlier this month, boasting 2.8trn parameters and performances closely rivalling that of OpenAI and Anthropic’s newest models. The multimodal model is designed for frontier intelligence across long-horizon coding, knowledge work and reasoning, according to its maker.
At the time of its launch, Kimi said that K3 performed “competitively” with Fable 5 and “substantially outperformed” Opus-4.8, GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.5. Bloomberg reported that initial interest drove daily sales at Moonshot up sixfold since K3’s debut.
The company temporarily paused taking on new subscribers just days after K3’s launch, after an unexpected number of users swarmed to try out the new model. New subscriptions are still paused, however, interested buyers can join the waitlist.
Chinese AI companies are attracting swarms of new users with models that offer similar capabilities at significantly cheaper prices, despite the many restrictions Washington placed on semiconductor exports to China over recent years. Reports show that such tactics led by the US pushed China to focus on its own chip capabilities instead.
Kimi K3’s launch garnered a similar reaction to DeepSeek’s release early last year, which authorities in the West viewed with scepticism, floating security concerns. Despite this, today’s release is expected to be profitable for cloud businesses that specialise in hosting third-party open models.
Moonshot hit a $20bn valuation in May after announcing a $2bn raise led by Chinese food delivery company Meituan’s VC arm Long-Z Investments, alongside Shuimu Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng.
Now, it is reportedly working towards a public listing in as early as six months and closing a funding round that could value the three-year-old start-up at more than $30bn.
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