[The Dark Side of the Moon to Release New Model Kimi K3, Potentially Surpassing Opus 4.8] According to Deep Tide TechFlow, on July 16, the Financial Times reported that Chinese AI startup The Dark Side of the Moon is set to launch a new model with capabilities approaching those developed by leading U.S. AI labs, such as Anthropic. This highlights the narrowing gap between China and the U.S. in cutting-edge AI technology. According to two informed sources, The Dark Side of the Moon plans to release Kimi K3 in the coming days. The model boasts a parameter scale of 2 trillion to 3 trillion, making it the largest AI model in China to date. While Anthropic has not disclosed the parameter scale of its models, industry insiders generally estimate that Opus 4.8 has around 1.5 trillion to 2 trillion parameters. Sources indicate that based on mainstream evaluation benchmarks, K3 is expected to outperform Opus 4.8 and will be made available for free download as an "open-weight" model. This move poses a significant challenge to U.S. AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, whose high-cost, cutting-edge models remain closed-source.