Moonshot.
"Staggering speed".
News Items is “the most valuable newsletter out there.” — Peggy Noonan.
1. Financial Times:
Xi Jinping has set out China’s ambitions to rival the US as a global leader in AI, a day after almost 30 countries joined a coalition that will hand Beijing more control over the development of the technology.
China’s president called for “extensive international co-operation” as he warned over AI’s risks, and said China would offer training to developing countries and help them build capacity.
Speaking at an AI conference in Shanghai on Friday, Xi said that the more AI developed at a “staggering speed”, the more there was a need for a “positive direction”.
“[We must] more precisely grasp the scale of oversight and governance, and more promptly refine measures to forestall loss of control,” he said.
The body stands to give Beijing influence over domains such as international standard-setting for AI as the country’s large language models increasingly compete with their US rivals for global influence. (Source: ft.com)
2. Financial Times:
Chinese AI start-up Moonshot has released a large language model with capabilities approaching those of frontier US labs such as Anthropic, as the gap narrows between the two countries on state-of-the-art AI.
The Beijing-based group released Kimi K3, China’s largest AI model to date with 2.8 trillion parameters, on Thursday. The number of parameters refers to the size of the model’s neural network, with a higher count generally leading to greater capabilities.
Anthropic has not disclosed its models’ parameters, but industry experts speculate its flagship Claude Opus 4.8 has 1.5 trillion-2 trillion parameters.
K3 was beating Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 in most coding and general AI agent benchmarks, according to results released by Moonshot. On most benchmarks it was still falling short of Fable, a powerful model that Anthropic briefly suspended after the US raised concerns over its hacking capabilities. (Source: ft.com)
3. Bloomberg.com:
On a video conference call from Hangzhou earlier this year, one of China’s hottest startups held a four-hour pitch meeting with potential venture investors that was unusual by almost any measure. Only two representatives per institution were allowed. The majority of those present were getting a glimpse of the company’s leader for the very first time.
“We’re a group of very ordinary people,” said Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s elusive founder, according to some of the attendees.
His comment belies the extraordinary status of his company, a Chinese startup that has shaken up the global tech industry with powerful models trained on a fraction of the resources used by OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Liang ultimately raised $7.4 billion in the largest private AI financing in Chinese history, valuing the three-year-old lab at more than $50 billion. Just weeks later, DeepSeek is plotting an initial public offering in 2027 that will likely bring in billions more.
Liang is now poised to lead a fresh, potentially more threatening, challenge to Silicon Valley. With coffers full, DeepSeek has more resources to develop cutting-edge AI services and offer them globally at prices far below US rivals. Chinese low-cost, open-source services risk undercutting the business prospects for OpenAI and Anthropic in overseas markets — and increasingly in the US.
“DeepSeek isn’t just a technical breakthrough, it’s an economic one,” said Robert Wu, chief executive officer of BigOne Lab, a Chinese analytics company that tracks technology trends. (Source: bloomberg.com)
4. Financial Times:
Global tech stocks dropped sharply earlier today, putting an index of US semiconductor companies on track for its worst week since last year’s “liberation day” market rout, as investors cooled on some of the biggest winners from the AI boom.
Japan’s tech-heavy Nikkei 225 index sank 4 per cent and China’s CSI 300 weakened 3.6 per cent, following Thursday’s losses on Wall Street. Nasdaq 100 futures were down 1.8 per cent after the index lost 1.6 per cent in the previous session.
The sharpest moves came in high-flying semiconductor stocks — particularly makers of memory chips — in an abrupt reversal for so-called momentum trades, where investors bet on further gains for market leaders.
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