For the past few years, we have surging AI race and while there are many winners, most of us in America tend to follow companies in America. However, there are other countries which means there are other companies and perhaps they will be the competition for America’s firms.
In an article by Samuel Shen and Kane Wu of Reuters, Chinese startup Moonshot AI has paused new subscriptions because demand is too high for its services. Moonshot AI has launched Kimi K3.
The company has engaged financial advisors including Goldman Sachs and China International Capital Corp (CICC) to discuss an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The company was founded by Yang Zhilin, an AI researcher who pursed his doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg.
Moonshot AI has raised more than $2 billion from investors including Meituan, China Mobile and CPE bringing the total raised over $5.5 billion. The $2 billion raised suggests the company has a valuation of $30 billion.
The company has 2 types of membership – one for coding and more inclusive package to help match compute resources with user demand.
Kimi K3 size and focus on coding and agent style tasks make it more expensive to serve at scale, as such workflows typically require repeated model calls and heavy inference capacity.
While open-weight models allow users to download and customize the underlying system, analysts say few users are likely to host a model of Kimi K3’s scale because of the hardware costs involved.
Linking to dividend paying stocks, there is always competition in the industry, and often we focus on the local, regional or national, but companies do the same thing exist outside of the borders. With most industry price matters and cost efficiency is a diver to try out the competition. The company may come back but they begin to allocate a little less resources each year to save costs. It is difficult to be profitable on a yearly basis, but always ask the CEO who is the competition?
There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.
