Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 are genuinely catching up to Western frontier models in performance, not just PR, as evidenced by demand overwhelming Kimi's ability to sign up new users.
Jason argues the new Chinese model launches are significant, with Kimi being flooded by so much demand they cannot sign up new users, though he warns not to over-index on eval tweets. ✦ AI generated
Jason · 20VC · 2026-07-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 1:22
“how significant were the two model announcements that we saw today and what should we be taking from their seemingly catching up or close to with the frontier models we have in the west.”
I mean an eval is just an eval. So let's not take a bunch of folks on X who had someone in their uh in their engineering department look at some evals and write a tweet for them. Okay? like it we're not saying something uh is similar in performance maybe but but but let let's prove it in the field having said that I mean we can't even sign up new as consumers for Kimmy because it's blocked they have so much demand since this happened right demand is is literally I don't know whether it's geometric or exponential but it's so high we can't even we can't even we need we we can come back to this next week when it opens up and I can use it on the consumer side even better but I mean I think it there's a lot going on and there's a lot on politics and there's it's an aha moment and a wakeup moment. On the other hand, it's not new. It's not new, right? I mean, if you look at, you know, if you look at open router data, half the traffic's through China, China created models. Even China models is a confusing term, right? They may well be hosted on uh yeah, they may well hosted in the US, right? And when they have open weights, they may be they may be for all intents and purposes truly open source models hosted in the US. Uh but it's not new. It's just going to accelerate this. And that's why you see the stress. It's just it's accelerating.
verbatim transcript · starts at 1:22
1:18million round and it would be like the thing for a week. And now I like days go by and you're like, "Wow, we're forgetting the the Stripe and the PayPal, which we'll get to, which is mega." But I'm going to start on uh the two near frontier openweight models that we saw in the last seven days from China. Um one of them being Kimmy, which has got a lot of attention and a lot of
1:40press, and then the other being Quen from Alibaba. um how significant were the two model announcements that we saw today and what should we be taking from their seemingly catching up or close to with the frontier models we have in the west. >> I mean an eval is just an eval. So let's not take a bunch of folks on X who had someone in their uh in their engineering
2:03department look at some evals and write a tweet for them. Okay? like it we're not saying something uh is similar in performance maybe but but but let let's prove it in the field having said that I mean we can't even sign up new as consumers for Kimmy because it's blocked they have so much demand since this happened right demand is is literally I don't know whether it's geometric or
2:22exponential but it's so high we can't even we can't even we need we we can come back to this next week when it opens up and I can use it on the consumer side even better but I mean I think it there's a lot going on and there's a lot on politics and there's it's an aha moment and a wakeup moment On the other hand, it's not new. It's
2:39not new, right? I mean, if you look at, you know, if you look at open router data, half the traffic's through China, China created models. Even China models is a confusing term, right? They may well be hosted on uh yeah, they may well hosted in the US, right? And when they have open weights, they may be they may be for all intents and purposes truly open source models hosted in the US. Uh
3:02but it's not new. It's just going to accelerate this. And that's why you see the stress. It's just it's accelerating. Um and uh 50 that 50% instead of being niche or for tech forward folks or ventureback folks, you know, in a year it could be everybody and that that is that's material just being in the zone and even materially cheaper. It's just going to get more and more attention.
3:24>> I totally agree with that actually Jason. I was curious to see what you say is that there wasn't you you Carrie you kind of led with the what do these new models mean? I think Jason's cuts exactly right. It's exactly what you'd expect. It turns out the five wy and there's five main Chinese um kind of LLM companies and a bunch of followers. It turns out that you know aggressively
3:44funded companies with smart engineers are just going to keep cranking through and building new models and um yeah they're they're not state-of-the-art compared to the frontier models but they're you know 6 n months behind depending on how you measure it. So yeah, actually no new news about that. But Jason's right, quite a lot of fun news about how kind of parts of the US responded to that. We had the small P