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Fortune
Fortune
Nicholas Gordon

China's Moonshot, Z.AI, and DeepSeek are challenging U.S. AI labs—and beating them on cost

(Credit: Illustration by Tyler Comrie; photos from Getty Images)

It was, perhaps, the worst-kept secret in the AI community.

In mid-July, online sleuths who obsessively track the internet for signs of new AI models started to whisper about the latest offering from Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi large language model: Something big was coming.

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