The release of China’s Frontier AI model, Kimi K3, as an open-source model is the next ‘Sputnik moment’ for the US and the West. Moonshots, arguably the most important podcast for AI enthusiasts, coined this comparison with Sputnik 1 when Deepseek emerged on the global scene and changed everything. Now, with Kimi K3, there is a model that is in the same league as the flagship AIs from the billion-dollar AI labs in Silicon Valley.
The only difference is that, thanks to its open-source licence, Kimi K3 is openly and unregulated available to anyone who wants it and has the necessary hardware. Thanks to the sanctions imposed on China by the world’s freest country, Kimi K3 has significantly lower hardware requirements than the US models. Monnshot claims a 99 per cent reduction in resource consumption in some areas. So whilst the US and its European offshoots have to build new nuclear power stations, all Kimi needs is one or two new solar panels on the garage roof.
Far more serious – and far more devastating for the US AI industry – than Chinese ‘Frontier’ models is so-called ‘Liquid AI’. Liquid AI is the marketing term for AI systems tailored to specific purposes. For instance, huge large language models (LLMs) from data centres are not required for speech recognition or image interpretation. If, for example, you want to sort your photos locally and display all the photos of your child or dog that you have on your phone, a 50-MB mini-AI is perfectly sufficient. It runs locally on the phone and doesn’t ‘call home’, neither to China nor to the US.
And so there are 1,000 use cases that require only small, extremely specialised models. This only works if the large models from which the mini-AIs are distilled are open source. As China is the only country making the world’s full-fledged LLMs available, it is undoubtedly the undisputed global market leader. And in Silicon Valley, the transhumanists can already start uploading themselves to the cloud – it’s bound to come in handy one day. Overtaking but without catching up!
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