The new Chinese LLM is not what (some) people think.
Kimi K3, the new open-weights LLM from Chinese lab Moonshot AI , dropped last week. It’s a powerful model that, perhaps inevitably, sparked debate — including accusations of ushering in decelerationist ‘ AI communism ’ (whatever that means).
Amidst the noise, a number of AI commentators (including the Hard Fork guys and Scott Galloway) have asserted that K3 is noteworthy because it’s nearly as good as US models, at a fraction of the cost.
Unfortunately, they are wrong. Just because a model is Chinese, it is not magically cheap. And in fact, K3 isn’t cheap. Across Artificial Analysis’s ‘ Intelligence Index ’ benchmark, it cost slightly less per task than OpenAI’s top model. Compared to other Chinese models, it’s positively expensive - double the cost of GLM-5.2, and ~20x more than DeepSeek V4.
There’s nuance, of course. Kimi costs less for coding , but more for office work . It’s verbose, so it takes longer to solve problems. It’s open-weights, so you could (with a few GPUs) finetune it for your own purposes. But we’re not talking nuance here, this is just about one claim that I’ve seen/heard enough to find slightly annoying.
In summary: Is K3 a big step forwards for Chinese LLMs (and the open-weights people)? Yes . Is it concerning for the US market that a Chinese lab have fast-followed OpenAI and Anthropic with much less capex, possibly aided by distillation? Also yes . Is it cheap? No. No it isn’t. Please stop saying that. And please stop saying it’s another ‘DeepSeek moment’ too.