OpenAI President Praises Kimi K3: Strong Competitor, Unsure About Use of OpenAI Tech

Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, recently praised the Kimi K3 model from China's Moonshot AI, calling it "quite good" and a strong competitor. However, he said it's too early to tell if Moonshot used "distillation" to train Kimi K3 with outputs from OpenAI models, adding that the company is monitoring such activity.

Moonshot AI released the open-weight Kimi K3 last week, claiming it outperforms all rivals except Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6. The model has shaken the market and challenged the long-held view that the US leads China in AI.

Brockman noted some estimates suggest China may be only 4 months behind the US in AI model development, with the gap narrowing fast. As cheaper Chinese models spread, OpenAI and Anthropic face more uncertainty in their business models as they prepare for IPOs and aim to boost customer revenue. He stressed that OpenAI still has a "huge advantage" due to early heavy computing investments and years of research, but the real competition is about building the most efficient, smartest, and cost-effective models.