Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin took the stage at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in 2026 to unveil Kimi K3, a new multimodal AI model positioned as a direct competitor to leading US models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The model features 2.8 trillion parameters and a one-million-token context window, allowing it to process vast amounts of information in a single session. Crucially, Kimi K3 is an open-weight model, enabling developers to download and run it themselves, a key differentiator from the closed APIs of competitors like OpenAI's GPT series.
Beyond language, the model incorporates vision processing for multimodal applications in document analysis and visual reasoning. Moonshot AI has priced API access aggressively at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
The company, founded by the Carnegie Mellon PhD graduate in March 2023, has seen rapid growth. A $2 billion funding round in May 2026, led by Meituan with participation from Alibaba, pushed its valuation past $20 billion.