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Chinese AI firm Moonshot has paused new subscriptions for its powerful new Kimi K3 model due to high demand – days after it was released with capabilities rivaling those of OpenAI and Anthropic.
The Beijing-based Moonshot said Sunday it was grappling with “unprecedented compute challenges” and would temporarily focus on ensuring it could serve its existing paid users. The large-language model was trained on 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-source model ever released.
“Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it,” Moonshot wrote in an X post. “Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity.”
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Moonshot was founded in 2023 by AI researcher Yang Zhilin, who once studied at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. His firm is one of several Chinese AI startups that have gained steam in recent months while releasing powerful open-source models that are available for a fraction of the cost of Anthropic and OpenAI offerings.
Benchmark tests showed Kimi K3 outperforming Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 model and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.5 on most coding tasks, though it is still less powerful that Anthropic’s cutting-edge Fable model.
Meanwhile, Moonshot has begun talks with Goldman Sachs and other firms about a potential initial public offering in Hong Kong, Reuters reported, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.
The company, which has raised more than $5.5 billion from investors to date, has seeking an injection of $2 billion in new capital, the outlet reported. Moonshot’s valuation was $30 billion as of June.
Some US officials are fretting that China is catching up to American firms in AI development despite tough export controls that have limited the country’s access to the best computer chips offered by Nvidia.
As The Post reported, Anthropic and OpenAI have each accused Chinese rivals in recent months of using unauthorized distillation – in which a more advanced AI model is used to train a new one – to rip off their technology.
Last February, Anthropic directly accused Moonshot and two other Chinese firms, DeepSeek and Minimax, of distilling its models. So far, Anthropic has not said whether it suspects distillation was used to help build Kimi K3.
With Post wires
