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Last week, a Chinese-made large language model called Kimi K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI, burst onto the scene.
The open-weight model impressed with early benchmark results, trading blows with some of the most advanced closed-weight ones being developed by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic — and at a fraction of the cost.
Much like Chinese competitor DeepSeek’s AI model upending Silicon Valley in early 2025, Kimi-K3 sent shockwaves across the industry. A major sell-off roiled the tech-heavy Nasdaq, with the S&P 500 slipping after the unveiling.
For top closed-weight AI labs, it was the perfect storm. Executives are already balking at rapidly rising costs and desperately looking for cheaper alternatives. Kimi K3 may end up luring them in, making it even harder for the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic to attract new customers — right as they need to cover at least some of their exorbitant costs.
OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean Ball, who joined the Sam Altman-led company two weeks ago after helping shape AI policy for the Trump administration, was shaken by what he saw. In a lengthy and controversial tweet on Friday, Ball accused the Chinese state of acting recklessly by allowing models as powerful as Kimi K3 to be open sourced “given potential risks.”
Ball also argued that “open-weight models are inherently decelerationist,” a claim that sparked a raging debate in the comments. In the context of AI, accelerationism advocates for faster AI progress to establish a new world order. Decelerationism, by contrast, argues that the risks outweigh the benefits, calling for a far more careful approach.
To Ball, open-weight models hinder the progress of AI by deterring labs from investing more capital in development. As a result, he predicted that the Trump administration would “create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models,” which would in turn generate enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt — or “FUD,” in the lingo — that would have hyperscalers back off from using Chinese AI.
Leaving aside his glaring conflict of interest as an executive at OpenAI, netizens were baffled by his line of argumentation.
“The head of strategic futures OpenAI seems a little rattled,” one user wrote.
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