China's 2.8T-parameter open Kimi K3 rivals US frontrunners at a fraction of the cost

moonshot ai and alibaba fired back at us dominance with kimi k3 and qwen3.8, two massive open models claiming parity with openai and anthropic's best systems. moonshot pegs k3's parameters at 2.8 trillion, while alibaba's qwen3.8 sits at 2.4 trillion, both opting to release weights publicly—a stark contrast to the closed approaches of us labs. the releases challenge the assumption that massive capex is required to reach the frontier, suggesting chinese firms can compete with far fewer resources. independent verification is pending, but the move intensifies the race for open ai supremacy.