Elon Musk on China AI race and Kimi K3
The part of Musk's answer worth sitting with is the compute math, not the model ranking. He still puts Fable at the top, and says anyone being realistic would agree. Kimi K3 out of China, though, has gotten quite close to that leading model. What he flags next is the bit US labs should be uneasy about. China is pulling strong AI results with a fairly limited amount of compute. Hand them more of it, in his words, and "there's a good chance they would be the leaders." Strip it down and the race is two ideas. The frontier advantage sits with Fable. Chips and power are what's keeping China from the top spot. The honest read doesn't match the "Kimi beats all models" posts floating around. So the real question: which do you actually spin up, the current leader or the one gaining on it? I ran GPT-6 Astra against Kimi K3. Full guide below.
Transcript (en)
AI companies that several that are very good. The new Kimi model. Kimi K3, the one that came out last week, is almost as good as Fable, right? Well, I think realistically Fable is still clearly the smartest model. I think anyone realistically would say that that's still the case. But the Kimi model is getting quite close to Fable. Now, Anthropic had Mythos from which Fable is derived. I think they had that ready in February. They've got, I'm not sure what they call it, but Mythos 2 or Fable 6 or something. Something much better than what they had in February. They almost certainly have. Not almost certainly. They certainly have right now. And I think they could release it at any time. any time. Just before we get on to releasing how do you think about the Chinese models and the geopolitics of it Are you worried about the Chinese catching up and getting ahead Given that the Chinese AI companies are doing as well as they are with a relatively small amount of compute, it seems that if they had a lot of compute, there's a good chance that they would be the leaders. And at some point, they probably will have a lot of compute. So they will, ergo, they will be the leaders? There's a good chance that they are the leaders at some point. You can think of the constraints on AI, essentially electricity and AI chips, and then for physical AI, the robots. China's also got some very good robot companies. In fact, they have these robot sporting events. I don't know if you've seen some of them. Yes, I have. Last time I was in Beijing, I saw the robots. Yeah. And then they have this sort of like a boxing match or a fighting match with the robots, which is quite entertaining. And I saw some video of a robot that got his head knocked off and kept fighting, even with its head knocked off. That looked pretty funny, but... In fact, I think the robot battles are gonna be
