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As a Chinese user, I can say that many people use Kimi, even though I personally don’t use it much. China’s open-source strategy has many significant effects—no
by yanhangyhy 1y ago
As a Chinese user, I can say that many people use Kimi, even though I personally don’t use it much. China’s open-source strategy has many significant effects—not only because it aligns with the spirit of open source. For domestic Chinese companies, it also prevents startups from making reckless investments to develop mediocre models. Instead, everyone is pushed to start from a relatively high baseline. Of course, many small companies in the U.S., Japan, and Europe are also building on Qwen. Kimi is similar: before DeepSeek and others emerged, their model quality was pretty bad. Once the open-source strategy was set, these companies had no choice but to adjust their product lines and development approaches to improve their models.
Moreover, the ultimate competition between models will eventually become a competition over energy. China’s open-source models have major advantages in energy consumption, and China itself has a huge advantage in energy resources. They may not necessarily outperform the U.S., but they probably won’t fall too far behind either.
- lettergram 1y agoThere’s a lot of indications that we’re currently brute forcing these models. There’s honestly not a reason they have to be 1T parameters and cost an insane amount to train and run on inference. What we’re going to see is as energy becomes a problem; they’ll simply shift to more effective and efficient architectures on both physical hardware and model design. I suspect they can also simply charge more for the service, which reduces usage for senseless applications.
- yanhangyhy 1y agoThere are also elements of stock price hype and geopolitical competition involved. The major U.S. tech giants are all tied to the same bandwagon — they have to maintain this cycle: buy chips → build data centers → release new models → buy more chips. It might only stop once the electricity problem becomes truly unsustainable. Of course, I don’t fully understand the specific situation in the U.S., but I even feel that one day they might flee the U.S. altogether and move to the Middle East to secure resources.
- MallocVoidstar 1y ago> What we’re going to see is as energy becomes a problem This is much more likely to be an issue in the US than in China. https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-infrastructure/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-in...
- thesmtsolver 1y agoDisagree. Part of the reason China produces more power (and pollution) is due to China manufacturing for the US. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-do-china-and-america-think-about-the-energy-transition/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-do-china-and-america-... The source for China's energy is more fragile than that of the US. > Coal is by far China’s largest energy source, while the United States has a more balanced energy system, running on roughly one-third oil, one-third natural gas, and one-third other sources, including coal, nuclear, hydroelectricity, and other renewables. Also, China's GDP is a bit less inefficient in terms of power used per unit of GDP. China relies on coal and imports. > However, China uses roughly 20% more energy per unit of GDP than the United States. Remember, China still suffers from blackouts due to manufacturing demand not matching supply. The fortune article seems like a fluff piece. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1042209223/why-covid-is-affecting-chinas-power-rations https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1042209223/why-covid-is-affec... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58733193 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58733193
- mullingitover 1y agoThese stories are from 2021. China has been adding something like a 1GW coal plant’s worth of solar generation every eight hours in the past year, and the rate is accelerating. The US is no longer a serious competitor for China when it comes to energy production.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DeH40 1y agoThe reason it happened in 2021, I think, might be that China took on the production capacity gap caused by COVID shutdowns in other parts of the world. The short-term surge in production led to a temporary imbalance in the supply and demand of electricity
- simonw 1y ago> There’s honestly not a reason they have to be 1T parameters and cost an insane amount to train and run on inference. Kimi K2 Thinking is rumored to have cost $4.6m to train - according to "a source familiar with the matter": https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/alibaba-backed-moonshot-releases-new-ai-model-kimi-k2-thinking.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/alibaba-backed-moonshot-rele... I think the most interesting recent Chinese model may be MiniMax M2, which is just 200B parameters but benchmarks close to Sonnet 4, at least for coding. That's small enough to run well on ~$5,000 of hardware, as opposed to the 1T models which require vastly more expensive machines.
- electroglyph 1y agoi assume that $4.6 mil is just the cost of the electricity?
- simonw 1y agoHard to be sure because the source of that information isn't known, but generally when people talk about training costs like this they include more than just the electricity but exclude staffing costs. Other reported training costs tend to include rental of the cloud hardware (or equivalent if the hardware is owned by the company), e.g. NVIDIA H100s are sometimes priced out in cost-per-hour.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoCitation needed on "generally when people talk about training costs like this they include more than just the electricity but exclude staffing costs". It would be simply wrong to exclude the staffing costs. When each engineer costs well over 1 million USD in total costs year over year, you sure as hell account for them.
- vanviegen 1y agoNo, because what people are generally trying to express with numbers like these, is how much compute went into training. Perhaps another measure, like zettaflop or something would have made more sense.
- Leynos 1y agoHaving larger models is nice because they have a much wider sphere of knowledge to draw on. Not in the sense of using them as encyclopedias. More in the sense that I want a model that is going to be able to cross reference from multiple domains that I might not have considered when trying to solve a problem.
- yanhangyhy 1y agoOne thing to add: the most popular product in china on AI is not kimi i think' it shoud be DOUBAO by bytedance(tiktok owner) and yuanbao by tencent. The have a better UI and feature set and you can also select deepseek model from it. Kimi still has a lot of users but I think in the long term it still may not doing well. So its still a win for closed model?
- dzonga 1y agoyou guys will outperform the US, no doubt. energy generation multiples of what the US is producing. What does AI need ? Energy. second - the open source nature of the models - means as you said a high baseline to start with - faster iteration.
- chaostheory 1y agoGoing on a tangent, is Europe even close? Mistral has been underwhelming
- LaurensBER 1y agoNot anywhere near close. Europe doesn't have the infrastructure (legal or energy) and US companies offer far better compensation for talent. But hey, at least we have AI regulation! (sad smile :))
- troyvit 1y agoI don't know if how close Europe is, but I'm sufficiently whelmed by Mistral that I don't need to look elsewhere yet. It's kind-of like having a Toyota Corolla while everybody else is driving around in smart cars but it gets it done. On top of it, there's a loyal community that (maybe because I'm not looking) I don't see with other products. It probably depends on your uses, but if I spent all my time chasing the latest chat models (like Kimi K2 for instance) I wouldn't actually get anything done.
- rmrf100 1y ago[dead]
- almnifeed 1y agoHow can I use it ?
- yanhangyhy 1y agogoogle play or app store? or https://www.kimi.com/en/ https://www.kimi.com/en/