Is Kimi K3 Really Fable Class?

Today on the AI Daily Brief, did we actually just get a fable level open model? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, robots and pencils, Blitsy, and Airtable. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe at our podcast. And, of course, to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Alright, friends. Well, today, we are talking about Kimmy k three. The month of models continues and today we're going to try to figure out just how significant this one is. At first glance, there are some very significant and bold claims being thrown around, but we're gonna unpack what's real, what's not, and what the implications are. And to understand this or, frankly, any frontier Chinese model, you have to put it in the context of the way that The US market sees the AI race. Since we're coming to the end of the World Cup, let me plumb for a soccer analogy. When it comes to our lead on China in terms of advanced models, we very much have one to zero type of energy. What I mean by that is that there's no doubt that we're in the lead, but the score line is not something that anyone is particularly comfortable with. The US tends to act like it can feel China coming up on our heels, pressing their advantages and trying to find the equalizer. In other words, despite being in the lead, it can sometimes feel like we're the ones hanging on. And by the way, for any of you three Lions fans out there, I am so sorry to use this analogy in this particularly difficult moment. In any case, you can see examples of this feeling of China nipping at our heels spread throughout the last couple of years. The best example, of course, was when DeepSeek r one was released, and it ripped hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap off some of the leading companies, including NVIDIA, which had the biggest one day fall in dollar terms in stock history. And yet that deep seek moment set the tone for all the future quote, unquote deep seek moments that would come in more ways than one. What I mean by that is that not only was it a moment where the market freaked out about China having caught up or even exceeded US capabilities, reacting quite severely in market terms, but it was also just pretty meaningfully overblown. It's not that DeepSeek's r one wasn't impressive, but a big part of the reason that it seemed so impressive was that it was democratizing access to a technology that had thus far been locked behind a paywall when it came to companies like OpenAI. The model itself was …