China doesn’t need to build better AI than the US to win the tech race

UP ONE day, down the other. That pretty much sums up the US stock market – and my corresponding blood pressure – these days as investors try to work out whether the artificial intelligence boom is a bubble waiting to burst.

One development that made waves was the unveiling of Chinese AI startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3 open-weight model on Jul 17, which reportedly rivals frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI at a fraction of the cost.

Much of the AI race has been framed as a contest over who can build the smartest model. But that may no longer be the right question to ask.