Is Kimi K3 Really Fable Class?
episode
The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
28 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
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Did Moonshot just release a Fable-class open model with Kimi K3?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, did we actually just get a fable level open model? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy, and Airtable. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai-dailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And of course, to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at ai-dailybrief.ai. All right, friends. Well, today we are talking about Kimi K3. The month of models continues. And today we're going to try to figure out just how significant this one is.
At first glance, there are some very significant and bold claims being thrown around. but we're going to unpack what's real, what's not, and what the implications are. And to understand this, or frankly, any frontier Chinese model, you have to put it in the context of the way that the US market sees the AI race. Since we're coming to the end of the World Cup, let me plumb for a soccer analogy. When it comes to our lead on China in terms of advanced models, we very much have one to zero type of energy. What I mean by that is that there's no doubt that we're in the lead, but the scoreline is not something that anyone is particularly comfortable with. The U.S. tends to act like it can feel China coming up on our heels, pressing their advantages and trying to find the equalizer.
In other words, despite being in the lead, it can sometimes feel like we're the ones hanging on. And by the way, for any of you Three Lions fans out there, I am so sorry to use this analogy in this particularly difficult moment. In any case, you can see examples of this feeling of China nipping at our heels spread throughout the last couple of years. The best example, of course, was when DeepSeek R1 was released, and it ripped hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap off some of the leading companies, including NVIDIA, which had the biggest one-day fall in dollar terms in stock history. And yet that deep-seek moment set the tone for all the future quote-unquote deep-seek moments that would come in more ways than one.
What I mean by that is that not only was it a moment where the market freaked out about China having caught up or even exceeded U.S. capabilities, reacting quite severely in market terms, but it was also just pretty meaningfully overblown. It's not that DeepSeek's R1 wasn't impressive, but a big part of the reason that it seemed so impressive was that it was democratizing access to a technology that had thus far been locked behind a paywall when it came to companies like OpenAI. The model itself was actually still pretty meaningfully behind what the leading Western labs were doing, but that didn't change its ability to create some pretty significant psychological scars. Now, ever since then, we have been having mini deep-seek moments at a fairly regular clip.
The most recent one came when Fable 5 was locked down as per government order, when Z.AI's GLM 5.2 came out, leading to not only positive reviews on Twitter, but also this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which was printed and slapped on desks all over Washington, D.C. The article was called China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race, and as we discussed a lot then, was once again another example of the narrative being fairly overblown, but continuing to be persistent as something the US was worried about. For the last month, really ever since Fable 5 was released, there have been debates around how long it will take for Chinese companies to have a Fable 5 class model. In the middle of June, Elon Musk predicted Q1, to which the founder of Z.AI responded, won't take that long.
And so that was the setup coming into the announcement of Kimi K3. Now, Moonshot's Kimi models have been some of the most popular when it comes to Western users using models from Chinese labs. In fact, as we've been discussing fine tunes of open models like Cursor's Composer 2.5, they tend to be built around a Kimi base.
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