World’s largest 3T agent from China does weeks of work in hours to challenge US models

Moonshot AI has unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-source AI model described as the world’s first open 3T-class model. Hailed as the largest open-source AI model released to date, Kimi K3 follows Zhipu AI’s release of GLM-5.2 one month earlier. Efforts are intensifying among Chinese AI developers to narrow the gap with leading U.S. AI companies, according to the South China Morning Post. Designed for complex, long-horizon workflows, Kimi K3 features native vision capabilities and a one-million-token context window. This capability allows for longer coding sessions, large repositories, and workflows combining text, images, and other information, according to Moonshot. The company positioned Kimi K3 to support scientific research workflows. It can create research reports with interactive visualizations, scientific analyses, and editable presentations. Its Widgets and Dashboard features allow users to create persistent, interactive workspaces. The model completed a task in about two hours that would typically require one to two weeks of work by an experienced researcher. It is no wonder that Kimi K3 demonstrated “frontier-level performance across our evaluation suite, consistently outperforming other tested models,” as the company reported. However, it “still trails the most powerful proprietary models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol,” as per the blog post. Want to try it? You can. Step aside, Kimi is here In its launch blog, Moonshot AI said Kimi K3 was built using its Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals architecture, along with a Mixture-of-Experts framework that activates 16 out of 896 experts. The company stated that these updates improve scaling efficiency by approximately 2.5 times compared to Kimi K2. Kimi K3 achieved “open frontier intelligence” with 2.8 trillion parameters and was designed for “long-horizon coding, knowledge work and reasoning tasks,” according to the South China Morning Post. Moonshot’s benchmark results showed Kimi K3 outperforming several tested systems, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2. Moonshot demonstrated the model’s capabilities on its blog. The company showed Kimi K3 optimizing GPU kernels, developing a GPU compiler called MiniTriton, designing a prototype AI chip using open-source electronic design automation tools, and completing a computational astrophysics workflow. The model reproduced the I–Love–Q universal relations in computational astrophysics by reviewing and cross-validating more than 20 papers, implementing the numerical pipeline, evaluating more than 300 equations of state, generating more than 3,000 lines of Python code, and producing an interactive HTML dashboard. Will Kimi join the ranks of OpenAI? With a market size set to grow from $539.5 billion to $3,497.3 billion by 2033, AI’s global takeover appears undeniable, if not unstoppable. More than 50% of U.S. jobs are projected to be significantly altered by artificial intelligence within the next two to three years, according to the Boston Consulting Group. Kimi K3 has officially entered the market, as China aims to compete with U.S. companies. Kimi K3 is available now through Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API, according to Moonshot AI’s blog. The AI model launches with maximum reasoning effort enabled by default, while low- and high-effort modes will be introduced in future updates. The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026, alongside a technical report covering the model’s architecture, training process, and evaluations. Users can try Kimi K3 now through Moonshot’s platforms. Recommended ArticlesGet the latest in engineering, tech, space & science - delivered daily to your inbox.Originally from LA, Maria Mocerino has been published in Business Insider, The Irish Examiner, The Rogue Mag, Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, and now Interesting Engineering.