Why China is giving away its best AI models

Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, has released Kimi K3, an LLM (large language model, a type of AI trained on vast amounts of text) that performs comparably to top US AI models but at lower cost. The company plans to release the model's weights (the numerical parameters that define how the AI makes decisions) for free and is targeting US users, which has raised concerns in Silicon Valley about whether closed, proprietary AI models can remain dominant as more capable open-source alternatives become available.