Why can Kimi ship K3? Let me tell my story.
Earlier this year, I left academia for industry. I talked to a lot of companies along the way. Here's what I saw:
1⃣Arrogance. They believe the AI war is over, and they won. No hunger for the future, and no hunger for talent.
2⃣Restlessness. Young labs short on foundation, either rushing to catch the frontier or pivoting away from the competition.
3⃣Fear. Strong teams with real experience, but from the second tier, they can't quite bring themselves to aim for #1.
4⃣Misalignment. Everyone is optimizing for their own credit, but nobody really cares whether the company can reach AGI.
Kimi was different.
Over many conversations with the founders, the same thing came through every time: a raw, genuine hunger for AGI.
I joined. The hunger was real.
We shipped K3. This is only the beginning.
月之暗面新团队成员杨新宇解释了 Kimi 为什么能推出 K3。
他称,自己今年离开学界进入产业,期间接触了多家 AI 公司。他总结出同行的四种通病:
① 傲慢。 老牌团队认为 AI 战争已经结束,自己已经赢了,对未来和人才失去渴望。
② 浮躁。 年轻实验室基础不牢,只顾追赶前沿,追不上就匆忙转向其他赛道。
③ 胆怯。 一些团队经验丰富、实力不弱,却不敢把目标定为行业第一。
④ 目标错位。 每个人都在争取个人功劳,却没人真正关心公司能否做出 AGI。
杨新宇称,月之暗面最不同的地方,是创始团队仍对 AGI 保持强烈追求。这也是他选择加入的原因。
他还晒出一张「Kimi 五戒」:
① 模型公司要做模型。
② 做 Research、发 Paper 要做实验。
③ 训练模型要看 Metric。
④ 不 Work 的东西不要硬上。
⑤ 不要 YOLO。
翻成大白话,就是少讲故事,多做实验。训练要看数据,失败方案及时停,也不要靠直觉豪赌。
Congratulations to Zhilin Yang, founder and CEO of @Kimi_Moonshot, on the latest Kimi release. What a huge win for the open-source community!
It feels like just yesterday Zhilin was graduating from my lab at CMU, jointly co-advised with William Cohen. Not only did he complete his Ph.D. in just four years, but he also made truly fundamental contributions to ML during his time at CMU.
What a spectacular career! Congrats again Zhilin, and thank you and the entire Kimi team for everything you're doing for the open-source community.
Big news: Kimi-K3 by @Kimi_Moonshot is now #1 in the Frontend Code Arena with 1679 pts, surpassing Claude Fable 5.
This is a 17-place jump from Kimi-k2.6 (#18 -> #1).
In Frontend, Kimi-K3 ranked #1 in 6 of 7 domains: Brand & Marketing, Reference-Based Design, Data & Analytics, Consumer Product, Simulations, and Content Creation Tools, landing #2 only in Gaming behind Fable 5.
The full model weights will be released by July 27.
Congrats to the @Kimi_Moonshot team on this major milestone!
This week my Mates and I are interviewing NASA Administrator Jared Issacman on the MOONSHOTS Podcast.
What questions do you have for the Administrator?
Is Ontario's wildfire situation
under control?
Not yet. Fire crews are still battling active wildfires in Northern Ontario, while some communities remain evacuated.
The biggest danger now is not just the flames, it's the smoke spreading hundreds of kilometers across Canada.
The worst-hit areas are in Northwestern Ontario, including communities near Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Collins, Whitesand and Lac des Mille Lacs First Nations.
Thousands of hectares of forest are burning, forcing evacuations and sending smoke across the province - all the way to cities like Toronto.
Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption.
That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time.
Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.”
The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs.
That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone.
But the education system still runs on its logic.
A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait.
Neither is being served. Both are being processed.
Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.”
AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student.
One at a time. Every time.
It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle.
It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done.
A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture.
The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does.
No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill.
Because the math doesn’t work.
AI doesn’t have that constraint.
Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.”
The brain isn’t broken. The format is.
Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes.
That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem.
Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.”
Four years. Six figures of debt.
And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you.
The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance.
Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.”
The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you.
Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace.
The question isn’t whether the old model survives.
It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.
Elon Musk's personal pilot once described what happens on the plane between meetings.
He said Elon doesn't sleep on flights. He doesn't watch movies. He doesn't make small talk with whoever is traveling with him. He reads. For the entire flight. Technical papers, engineering specifications, physics textbooks. Highlighted. Annotated. Pages folded. Like a graduate student preparing for an exam that never ends.
The pilot said he has seen Elon read an entire 400-page engineering manual on a single transatlantic flight and then walk off the plane and ask questions about it that the authors of the manual probably couldn't answer. Not because he's trying to impress anyone. Because he genuinely needs to understand every system at the level of the engineers who designed it.
He said the most unsettling part is the speed. Elon doesn't read at a normal pace. He processes pages the way most people process paragraphs. And he retains almost everything. Engineers who worked with him for years say he will reference a detail from a paper he read six months ago mid-conversation as if he read it that morning.
The world sees a CEO making decisions. What actually happens is a man who reads more technical material than most PhD students and then walks into a room with the engineers and speaks their language. The authority isn't inherited from the title. It's earned page by page on every flight between factories.
Elon Musk just proved every sighted person on Earth is blind.
Your eye captures 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
You are not seeing the universe. You are seeing the sliver your biology decided was enough to keep you alive.
That was never vision. That was a survival filter bolted onto your perception four hundred million years ago.
No one has ever removed it.
Musk: “Blindsight will enable those who have total loss of vision to be able to see again. Including if they have lost their eyes, or the optic nerve.”
No eyes. No nerve. The entire optical system physically absent from the skull.
Neuralink does not rebuild what broke.
It routes around biology entirely. It streams synthetic signal straight into the visual cortex.
Your eye never saw anything.
Your brain did.
Your brain sits in total darkness inside a vault of bone.
It has never seen the sun. It has never seen anything.
It builds reality out of whatever electrical signal the eye allows through.
The eye is the bottleneck between your mind and the universe.
Neuralink removes the bottleneck.
Musk: “Maybe have never seen, were even blind from birth.”
A human who has never perceived a single photon of light.
Given sight for the first time.
Not through medicine. Through engineering.
Musk: “You can see in radar, you can see in infrared, ultraviolet.”
Infrared is pouring off every surface in the room around you.
Radio waves are passing through your body right now.
Ultraviolet is painting patterns across everything you have ever looked at.
You cannot see any of it.
Your biology locked you out before you were born.
Musk: “Superhuman capabilities.”
The person born blind would not be restored to human sight.
They would see more of the universe than any sighted person who has ever lived.
The blind would out-see the sighted.
You will not pity them.
You will envy them.
Musk: “Cybernetic enhancement.”
Every human sense is a sensor converting the world into electrical signal.
Replace the sensor and the brain does not care where the signal came from.
It just processes.
Your senses were never built to show you reality. They were built to show you just enough of it to survive.
Evolution built a keyhole. We called it sight.
Elon Musk is not fixing blindness.
He is fixing sight.
Hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and tech executives are pulling their kids from public and private schools to enroll them in AI-tutoring startups that pay staff to stop calling themselves teachers and face no state requirement to report how well any of it works.
Alpha School, now in a dozen cities and expanding to nearly two dozen more this fall, charges $75,000 a year in San Francisco for two hours of AI tutoring followed by project workshops, using software that tracks how closely a child pays attention. Forge Prep in New Jersey charges up to $36,000 and promises graduates a $200,000 payout if they start a company instead of taking a job. Billionaire Bill Ackman has publicly backed Alpha. Neither school reports outcomes to any state, and Forge's own founder admits there is no data showing things are going well.
Alpha sells home-schooling software on top of tuition. Forge's startup fund assumes graduates will found companies rather than join a labor market its own AI curriculum is designed to help automate. Alpha's spokeswoman says its families are overwhelmingly finance, venture capital, and tech workers, meaning the industry building the AI disrupting entry-level jobs is now selling itself a private curriculum to land its own kids on the ownership side of that disruption.
Alpha's in-person staff voted to reject the word teacher, and its remote coaches monitoring the AI software are scattered across the globe. Stanford's Victor Lee says dropping the title diminishes the professionalism teaching requires. Stanford's Caroline Hoxby, who studies these programs rather than sells them, says there is negligible scientific evidence behind any of it.
My take: The same investor class funding AI tools built to gut entry-level jobs is now buying its own children a private exemption from those tools' consequences, for $75,000 a year.
Public schools absorb AI disruption unfunded and unreformed while this cohort builds itself an unaccountable alternative marketed as personalization. This is what class stratification looks like once it gets rebranded as coaching, guides, and life skills.
https://t.co/eAZnvCxex1