Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI on Thursday released its latest model, Kimi K3, which features 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest-parameter open-source AI model globally, the company said.
Kimi K3 natively supports visual understanding and boasts a context window of 1 million tokens. It has been optimized for complex tasks including software engineering, knowledge-intensive work, deep research and multimodal understanding, Moonshot AI noted.
Kimi K3's overall intelligence level is close to that of globally leading closed-source models as revealed by evaluations, according to the Beijing-based startup.
"We have open-sourced the complete model weights and distilled the core technologies into a toolchain, making it fully accessible to the public," said Fu Qiang, a technician with Moonshot AI.
With continued breakthroughs in core technologies, Chinese open-source large models have grown into a core supplier of the global AI ecosystem.
"Previously, cutting-edge models were mostly in the hands of a few closed-source platforms, so companies could only really 'buy' the capabilities they needed. But with the rise of mature open-source models, businesses can now build on their own data, workflows, and domain expertise to develop AI applications that are far better suited to their real-world use cases," said Zhong Xinlong, an associate researcher at the Future Industries Research Center of the China Center for Information Industry Development.
According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, China now accounts for over 60 percent of global AI patent applications, the highest share worldwide.
