And the jokes from China just keep on coming…
When most readers read about “The Kimi Moment” it is described as something like this.
A surprise breakthrough from Chinese AI startup Moonshot rippled through global markets Friday, sending AI and semiconductor stocks sharply lower as investors drew parallels with last year’s “DeepSeek moment” and questioned whether the industry’s enormous spending spree is becoming harder to justify.
The catalyst was Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 model, which the company said rivals the strongest offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. The launch was quickly dubbed a new “Kimi moment” by investors, echoing the market shock unleashed by Chinese startup DeepSeek’s breakthrough last year.
The Chinese AI startup is actually not called Moonshot. The Company’s full name is Beijing Dark Side of Moon Technology Co Ltd. It’s a dual joke on the iconic Pink Floyd song and the fact that China sent a space rover to the moon but on the dark side (the part of the moon that is always dark and cold, the part that never faces the sun). DeepSeek’s joke was that its logo is a whale. Whale is a joke on Wall Street.
The problem that these Chinese AI startups expose is startling - they are far cheaper than their American counterparts. They used to be built on Nvidia chips but the Chinese now have their own chip production, to the point that Apple is now going to China for memory chips.
Users cheered the capabilities of Moonshot’s new model, with Leonid Mironov, a portfolio manager at Gavekal Capital Ltd., calling it “brilliant.”
“In my use, it’s clearly the best Chinese model ever,” Mironov said. “The blended price for K3 is about half of the Claude Opus and GPT-5.5, which represents meaningful improvement of economics of the tokens.”
“While breakthroughs such as Kimi’s model may raise questions about the pace of demand for certain high-end training chips, they do not necessarily undermine the broader AI infrastructure investment cycle,” said Gary Tan, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments. “We would take a more selective approach to the AI semiconductor value chain when assessing this ‘Kimi moment’.”
Earlier Friday, Xi hailed China’s advances in low-cost artificial intelligence while calling for a more open global technological order.
“AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” he said.
Yep… the same country that global investigative agencies are looking at for spreading drugs far worse than fentanyl (40-100 times worse in terms of their ability to kill and/or addict) is also creating jokes about capitalism and our ability to stop harming our own selves. meanwhile in another part of the universe, Trump gave a speech yesterday that was not covered by 2 national networks. He has threatened to revoke their licenses. He claims China is meddling in our elections. Is it not far better to focus on our own guy’s madness than to see that we’re getting our butts handed to us by Beijing? I think it is. Hey we’re a mad country. We are going down and it’s a mad fucking country run by mad fucking people…
