Big Technology Podcast · Wednesday, July 29, 2026
The recent performance of China's Kimi K3 AI model has surprised many, prompting questions about whether the United States can maintain its lead in the AI race. The model's capabilities, even if not at the absolute frontier, are sufficient to challenge the established dominance of US AI research.
“Now that Kimi K3 has effectively equaled maybe not the frontier frontier of US AI models, but enough frontier to make us question whether the lead will be maintainable at all. And then of course, what the implications are for the AI race.”
“So, let me um sort of set the stage here. Uh, we had this moment last year where deepseek was able to produce a really great results on reasoning at a cheaper price and the market flipped out. Okay, we know that happened. Uh, but even still, you know, the the despite the fact that people in the US, uh, and in Europe, and maybe all over the globe have known that China has is very capable in its AI research. Uh, the release of Kimi K3 largely had this reaction of like, how did they do that? Right. It's confused a lot of people, even though it shouldn't be a surprise necessarily because China's done it before. You know, it's sort of happened again.”