Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin took the stage at GTC 2026 to unveil Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight AI model. The Beijing-based startup, valued at $20 billion with $2 billion in funding, is positioning the model as a direct competitor to offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.
What Kimi K3 brings
Kimi K3 is an open-weight model, meaning developers can access and modify its parameters. At 2.8 trillion parameters, it ranks among the largest publicly known models. Moonshot AI has not disclosed the training compute or data used, but the scale suggests significant investment. The company claims the model achieves competitive performance on standard benchmarks, though independent verification is pending.
Moonshot AI's trajectory
Founded in 2023, Moonshot AI quickly became one of the best-funded AI startups in China. Its $2 billion in funding came from investors including Alibaba and Sequoia Capital China. The $20 billion valuation places it among the top private AI companies globally. Kimi K3 is the company's third major model release, following earlier versions that focused on language understanding and reasoning.
Competing with the US giants
OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude 3 are the current leaders in large language models. Kimi K3 enters a market where scale and openness are key differentiators. Moonshot AI is betting that an open-weight approach will attract developers and researchers who want more control than proprietary APIs offer. The company also plans to release a smaller, more efficient version for edge devices.
Yang Zhilin did not provide a specific release date for Kimi K3 during the GTC presentation. The model is expected to be available for download and licensing in the coming months, with pricing yet to be announced.
