Can China win over the world with open-weight AI models?

BEIJING/SHANGHAI/BANGKOK – Amid the cacophony of robot dogs, humanoids and towering chip racks at China’s premier artificial intelligence showcase, there was one particular conference drawcard that constantly turned heads. Reporters and delegates from around the world thronged the gleaming blue booth of Beijing start-up Moonshot AI, eager to understand the “secret sauce” behind the Kimi K3, its newly unveiled open-weight model, which rivals leading systems from America’s Anthropic and OpenAI on several benchmarks. Its launch on the opening day of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, held in Shanghai from July 17 to 20, helped maximise its impact. It fed a…