China’s Kimi drops an AI bomb while its rivals brawl
Remember when AI companies competed by building better products? Yeah, those were simpler times.
We wanted to do a quick round-up of all the latest AI news out of China this week, and two major stories caught our eye.
First, the cool stuff: Moonshot AI out of China just launched Kimi Researcher, and it's not your average chatbot upgrade:
- This thing performs 23 reasoning steps and crawls through 200+ URLs per query, delivering research reports that would make your college thesis advisor weep with joy.
- The AI agent was trained via end-to-end reinforcement learning and can autonomously scour hundreds of URLs to produce well-structured reports with visuals – essentially doing a junior analyst's job.
- It outputs not just text, but formatted tables and charts, bringing an academic flair to its answers.
- It beat OpenAI's o3 (with search tools!) on key benchmarks, achieving a state-of-the-art 26.9% on Humanity's Last Exam.
- Check out these demos of it in action or test it out yourself here.
- Manus, the self-proclaimed “world's first general AI agent” that can book flights, analyze stocks, and build websites autonomously. Less than 1% of its waitlist got access, but it costs up to $199/month.
- MiniMax M1, the efficiency king that matches GPT-4's performance but was trained for just $534,700 (that's 200x cheaper!). Oh, and it's completely open-source with a 1M token context window—try it.
- Zhipu's AutoGLM (rumination is the newest one), China's latest free agent that claims to be 8x faster than DeepSeek R1 while using 1/30th the computing resources (in fact, OpenAI called out Zhipu in particular in a recent blog post for the progress its making).
- Tencent's Hunyuan-A13B, an agent-optimized model w/ 80B total parameters )but only 13B active ones) that beats larger models on agent benchmarks like BFCL-v3 (78.3 score) while supporting dual-mode reasoning and 256K context AND runs on mid-range GPUs (demo to try).
For the rest of the world, China's AI surge means more competition and faster innovation. The Chinese government's heavy investment in AI (from cloud infrastructure to research grants) is fueling this boom. New AI startups are springing up with ample funding and access to huge datasets, while big players like Baidu (and their open-source Ernie family of models), Tencent (and their Hunyuan family of models), and Alibaba (and their Qwen family of models) pour resources into one-upping each other's models. It's a perfect storm for rapid progress.
Cities like Hangzhou have spawned "Coder Villages" – clusters of young developers living dorm-style and cranking out AI projects 24/7. The New York Times recently profiled this phenomenon, describing a "coder village" where thousands of engineers race to build the next ChatGPT in makeshift offices. The vibe is equal parts startup hackathon and gold rush. Young programmers are living in crowded apartments by day and coding by night, fueled by takeout noodles and lofty ambitions.
One 22-year-old developer reportedly said he left a comfy Big Tech job to join a startup in this "village" because "here, if I create the next big model, I become Jack Ma rich."
Now here's where it gets spicy: While Kimi was quietly revolutionizing AI research, the rest of the industry devolved into a middle school cafeteria food fight.
Hours before Kimi's launch, Huawei was forced to deny allegations that its Pangu models are just Alibaba's Qwen in a trench coat. An anonymous whistleblower claimed Huawei “cloned” Qwen-1.5, added some layers, and called it original. GitHub analyses showed suspiciously similar code. Yikes. (here’s a full breakdown).
Specifically, a GitHub user alleged Huawei's new open-source LLM (72B-parameter Pangu Pro model) was just Alibaba's 2.5 14B Qwen model in disguise, citing "extraordinary correlation." For context, this is a VERY popular model that's been downloaded over 4.5 million times on HuggingFace.
Some developers dissected the two models' outputs and found eerily similar quirks. Huawei responded by publishing its model's training recipe, trying to prove its originality.
Huawei's Noah's Ark Lab quickly fired back: No way, our model was built in-house on Ascend AI chips and merely used some open-source code with proper licenses. (They did admit to using snippets of others' code – with credit – which is common in open source.)
A little background on this: Not too long ago, Alibaba open-sourced its Qwen-7B model for anyone to use – a move seen as a swipe at rivals (and perhaps a bid to make copying them a non-issue).
Right now, Qwen models are popular with hobbyists on r/LocalLlama and home-brewed coders running AI models on their own machines, and some businesses run the incredibly popular DeepSeek (although we've heard adoption has somewhat plateaud)
Meanwhile, Huawei, facing U.S. sanctions, is leaning hard into AI to show it can innovate independently. Chinese tech media are abuzz with commentary that open-sourcing AI might be both a patriotic duty and a strategic weapon – if everyone has your model, no one can accuse you of stealing theirs.
This is not such an unfamiliar story in the AI industry… While American AI giants might not be stealing each other’s models, they are certainly stealing each other’s researchers.
Meta's been offering $100M signing bonuses to steal OpenAI talent. Zuckerberg personally WhatsApped researchers through his ”Recruiting Party 🎉” chat (yes, with the emoji). Result? At least 10 OpenAI researchers jumped ship, including the entire Zurich office (this site aims to track all his poaches so far).
OpenAI has already reported to investors that its stock paid to employees soared to 119% of last year’s revenue. And that was BEFORE Meta poached 10 of its top people.
But nothing—nothing—captures the absolute lawlessness of today's AI landscape quite like Cluely.
The Cluely saga is AI's Wild West in miniature:
- A16z backs this startup claiming to help people "cheat on everything"—job interviews, dates, you name it—using hidden AI earpieces.
- Within days, some guy named Soham (not to be confused with the dude working at 4 different YC startups simultaneously) creates "Cheating Daddy," an open-source clone.
- Then a YC startup called Glass steals Cheating Daddy's code, illegally relicenses it as Apache 2.0, and claims they "built it in 4 days."
A clone of a clone of a controversial product. It's cutthroats all the way down.
Why this matters: A16z partner Bryan Kim thinks this chaos is exactly the point. His theory? In AI, “momentum is the moat.” When OpenAI can clone your feature in their next update, the only defense is to move so fast that by the time they copy you, you're already three controversies ahead. Cluely's founder Roy Lee gets it: “Algorithms promote the most controversial things. I'm just applying the same principles on X and LinkedIn.”
This is also why AI slop will rise to the top on YouTube and beyond… the algos are fundamentally broken / bankrupt / perhaps even “cutthroat” themselves…
Our take: Welcome to AI's new world order. Whether it's Chinese labs cloning each other's models or Silicon Valley VCs funding literal cheating tools, the message is crystal clear. If this really is a winner-take-all race to AGI, then apparently anything goes. Ship fast, copy faster, and worry about ethics later.
For today's top American frontier labs, no price is to high to pay top talent, as made abundantly clear by Meta's power grabs.
The thing is, OpenAI can't afford to lose any more talent… not with its biggest launch looming, anyway. Whether its woes continue or are left in the dust depends on how the rest of July goes for the company.
Back in April, OpenAI delayed the launch of GPT-5 until the summer, and it’s expected any day now. Meanwhile, Elon promised Grok 4 “just after July 4th.” Industry insiders think they're both waiting to see who blinks first. If GPT-5 is worth the hype, then OpenAI is still on top. If it's not... then the whole industry better brace for pain, cutthroats and non-cutthroats alike.
