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Moonshot AI Draws Crowds at Shanghai's WAIC with 2.8-Trillion-Parameter Kimi K3 Model

July 20, 2026 at 12:25 EDT

Foundation Models
Open Source

At China's premier artificial intelligence summit in Shanghai, throngs of developers bypassed the towering booths of Alibaba and Tencent to crowd around a comparatively modest stand belonging to startup Moonshot AI, drawn by its newly unveiled Kimi K3 model.

WAIC 2026 · Shanghai · Moonshot AI

A Chinese Startup Steals the Show With Kimi K3

Developers crowded past Alibaba and Tencent to reach Moonshot AI's booth. Its new open-weights model — 2.8 trillion parameters, a 1-million-token context window — is narrowing the gap with America's best.

2.8T

parameters, natively multimodal

token context window

Frontend Code Arena — a first for a Chinese model

5M+

downloads · 4.4★ over ~33,500 reviews

Aggregate Intelligence Index

Kimi K3 lands in the leading tier — close, but still trailing the strongest U.S. systems.

59.9

Claude Fable 5

USA

58.9

GPT-5.6 Sol

USA

57.1

Kimi K3

China · Moonshot

Column heights scaled to score · higher is better

Why developers cheer

Open-weights release enables customization and local deployment
Lower-cost alternative to paid U.S. services
Beats earlier frontier models on some coding and agentic tasks

The caveats

Overall performance still behind the best U.S. models
Running at scale demands heavy hardware — 64+ accelerators
Full open-source release only slated for ~July 27

A pivotal moment in the U.S.–China AI contest: a homegrown startup delivering a frontier-class, openly distributed model — and drawing crowds away from the country's tech giants.

Momentum built on DeepSeek's 2025 breakthrough, amplified by an "AI for all" open-source push spotlighted at the summit.

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