On July 23, according to Bloomberg,OpenAI president Greg Brockman admitted that Dark Side of the Moon has developed a competitive new AI model and said he was not sure whether the Chinese company relied on OpenAI's technology.
Brockman
“It’s a pretty good model,” Brockman said in an interview on Tuesday, referring to the more advanced Kimi K3 that Dark Side of the Moon released a few days ago. “There’s no doubt about that.”
Brockman said it was too early to tell whether Dark Side of the Moon might improve its own model by extracting output from the OpenAI model through a so-called "distillation" technique. "It's something we've been monitoring," he said.
Dark Side of the Moon released a more advanced open weight model, Kimi K3, last week. The company says the model surpasses all competitors in overall capabilities except Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6. The announcement shook markets and upended long-held assumptions about how far the United States leads China in the global AI race.
Brockman said estimates he's seen show thatChina may be just four months behind the U.S. in model development. Other AI experts believe the gap may be even smaller.
Kimi K3
The emergence of more and more affordable Chinese models and the narrowing of the model capability gap have brought new uncertainties to OpenAI and Anthropic's business models. Both companies are working to bolster revenue from customers ahead of going public.
Brockman emphasized,Because OpenAI invested computing resources earlier and conducted AI research for many years, the company still has a "huge advantage" over its competitors."For many years, we have been focused on how to build efficient models that can achieve our goals," he said.
He also said that there is a "misconception" that open weight models like Kimi are free. “These large models still rely on a lot of computing power to run, and the cost of computing power is very high,” he said. “The real competition will be: How to build the most efficient and intelligent model and achieve the best task cost-performance ratio?”
As Chinese models continue to advance, there is speculation that the Trump administration may move to ban their use. OpenAI said in a statement,Open models are crucial to "the democratization of AI access" and "the progress made in China's open weight model cannot be a reason to oppose openness."
Brockman, who has donated to Trump's super PAC, declined to get deeply involved in the debate. Overall, however, he emphasized that it is important for the United States to "continue to lead" in the field of AI and expressed optimism about it.
"You're going to continue to see very, very special models emerge from leading AI labs," he said.