Chinese AI Models Moonshot and Alibaba Challenge US Dominance
Chinese AI developers Moonshot and Alibaba have introduced powerful new models, Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max, which have significantly heated the AI competition against Western dominance. The launch of Kimi K3, for instance, immediately strained computing capacity due to skyrocketing demand, forcing the developers to pause new subscriptions. Simultaneously, Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Max was presented as a near-frontier model, claiming competitive performance against leading global models like Anthropic’s Fable 5. This rapid pace of development and market response highlights the growing capability of Chinese AI to close the performance gap, prompting discussions about how big labs are lobbying against open models and the nature of this destructive rivalry.
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René Girard believed man is a creature of imitation. The French social theorist’s ideas have many fans in Silicon Valley. The competition to dominate artificial intelligence looks like a textbook case of the destructive rivalry he predicted. The question is who is the scapegoat.
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