What smart people are saying about China's hot new Kimi K3 AI model

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who served as President Donald Trump's first AI and crypto czar before moving in March to cochair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, called the release "concerning."

In a Friday X post sharing the Arena leaderboard, Sacks said it was the first time a Chinese model had taken the top spot for frontend coding, with Kimi K3 also scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.

Sacks argued the US is hobbling itself in response: blocking new data centers, layering on state regulations, and pushing for federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models. "This is how you lose the AI race," he wrote, warning that the rest of the world won't play by America's rules if it bogs itself down.

"Permissionless innovation" is how America won the internet, Sacks said, adding that the US can win in AI while addressing risks in a targeted way, "or we'll watch our lead evaporate."

In response to Sacks' analysis of Kimi 3 on X, the billionaire Khosla Ventures founder, Vinod Khosla, said he agreed and highlighted what he called "an even bigger issue"

"Agree, 100% we shouldn't be tying ourselves in knots," he wrote on X. "Even bigger issue is the brilliant talent we are scaring away from other countries with our immigration policies for great talent."

The Trump administration has moved to tighten immigration restrictions, including for student visas. Last year, Silicon Valley was rocked when the government introduced a $100,000 fee for employers sponsoring some new H-1B applications for foreign workers. The ruling was later struck down by a federal judge and remains in litigation.

In May, a US Citizenship and Immigration Services memo implied that people who could previously apply for a green card from inside the US may now have to leave the country while their case is being processed.

And just this week, the administration introduced a new rule that puts an expiration date on how long people on student visas can initially stay in the US.

Aaron Levie said the release was a "huge win" for companies building on AI.

In an X post on Thursday, the Box CEO congratulated the Kimi team and said it was "truly wild" to see this level of performance from open models, pointing to Kimi K3's third-place ranking on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index — behind only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.

Levie argued that cheaper frontier-level intelligence directly expands what enterprises can do with AI. There's a large backlog of workflows companies would love to automate, he said, held back only by token costs.

Ethan Mollick offered "a note of caution" amid the hype.

The Wharton professor, who studies AI's effects on work, took to X to say Kimi K3 "messed up in a bunch of ways" when he asked it to perform a complex statistical audit of some of his prior academic work, including misapplying statistical methods.

Mollick shared a detailed critique of K3's audit — generated, notably, by OpenAI's rival GPT-5.6 Pro model — that identified errors in the audit's core statistical approach. Mollick said he agreed with the critique.

Venture capitalist and "All-In Podcast" cohost Jason Calacanis said the pace of AI progress is accelerating, and made some bold predictions.

"It's happening folks," Calacanis wrote on X, sharing an Arena leaderboard showing Kimi K3 ranked first for frontend coding, ahead of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.

He argued the field has moved faster in the last 30 days, across a dozen players, than in the previous year, with open-source models "compounding" while frontier labs refine.

Calacanis predicted things will "get wild" when open-source AI reaches robotics, self-driving, and life sciences, and said that 2026 will be the year of AGI, with superintelligence following in 2027 or 2028.

"ITS GONNA GET VERY STRANGE," he wrote.

Russ Salakhutdinov, the CMU professor who co-advised Moonshot founder and CEO Yang Zhilin's Ph.D., called the release "a huge win for the open-source community."

In an X post, Salakhutdinov congratulated his former student, resurfacing a 2019 post celebrating Yang's thesis defense.

Yang completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in just four years, during which he contributed influential research, including Transformer-XL and XLNet, which helped shape the architecture of modern language models.

"It feels like just yesterday Zhilin was graduating from my lab at CMU," Salakhutdinov wrote, thanking Yang and the Kimi team "for everything you're doing for the open-source community."

Gary Marcus, a longtime critic of the AI industry's economics, had a blunter reaction.

"Congress should investigate. Seriously," Marcus wrote on X, quoting a Goldman Sachs chart showing capital expenditure for major US cloud providers projected to reach roughly $1 trillion in 2027, about eight times the projected spending of their Chinese counterparts.

Gavin Baker, a prominent investor and one of Wall Street's leading voices on the AI industry, called the release of Kimi K3 an "inflection point" for AI.

He said Kimi K3 is bad news for closed AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, but is a net positive for just about every other company in the world.

"Anything that lowers margins and increases competition at the model layer is good for every other AI layer: power, semiconductors, hyperscalers, neoclouds and yes even software," Baker wrote on X.

Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official whom OpenAI hired as its head of strategic futures, a role that puts him in charge of developing frontier AI policy proposals, said Kimi K3 was a "good model" and that he was suprised it was open source.

"I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks," he wrote on X. "To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it."

He wanted to say that China's open-source strategy aligns with segments of its political philosophy.

"One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a 'public good' which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of 'digital public infrastructure,'" he wrote.