Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups Moonshot AI and MiniMax have emerged as China’s strongest contenders to rival US frontier labs in 2025 – even as DeepSeek has stolen the spotlight as the poster child for the country’s AI ambitions. Moonshot AI, founded by 33-year-old Yang Zhilin, has sharply raised its profile in China’s AI ecosystem with…
Beijing-based Moonshot AI, a start-up valued at US$3.3 billion and backed by Chinese tech giants like Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, has presented another David-vs-Goliath story after creating an open-source model that “set new records across benchmarks that assess reasoning, coding and agent capabilities”. The new reasoning model, Kimi K2 Thinking, was the most…
Facebook parent Meta Platforms, a major proponent of open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models with its Llama family, has indicated it would be more “careful” going down the open-source road, a move that contrasts with China’s embrace of open-source. In fact, China has probably found the path to “surpass the US in AI” thanks to the…