Moonshot Builds Kimi K3 With 400-500 Staff in Two Years
Moonshot reached the AI frontier with its Kimi K3 model using a small team.
Andrew Curran highlighted that Moonshot developed its Kimi K3 model from zero to frontier level in just over two years. Owain Evans added that the company behind the model has about 400-500 staff, far smaller than the roughly 5k at Anthropic or 200k at Google. Evans searched for but found no evidence of former staff from Anthropic or OpenAI joining Moonshot. He noted the added challenges of building custom infrastructure for training at this scale.
Moonshot, who made Kimi K3, appear to have about 400-500 staff. Compare to ~5k staff at Anthropic, or ~200k at Google. Did any Moonshot staff join from Ant or OAI? I couldn't find any cases. It's easier to follow but there's plenty of complexity in developing frontier models:…
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4 posts@OwainEvans_UK The amazing thing to me was they caught up to the frontier from zero in just over two years, they took almost the exact same time as Elon.
Well, Moonshot is founded by a guy from Google… But it's probably more valuable at this point to track China's own research lineages. Reminder that Yang Zhilin is a student of Jie Tang, CEO of Zhipu. They're not novices. (this makes DeepSeek even more unusual)
Moonshot, who made Kimi K3, appear to have about 400-500 staff. Compare to ~5k staff at Anthropic, or ~200k at Google. Did any Moonshot staff join from Ant or OAI? I couldn't find any cases. It's easier to follow but there's plenty of complexity in developing frontier models:…
I don't find the work of ex-Frontier folks in China to be impressive so far. What has Tencent done in frontier LLMs? ByteDance Seed? Even poaching between Western labs is not as productive as a sustained research vision. Enough capeshit.
@OwainEvans_UK > Did any Moonshot staff join from Ant or OAI? I couldn't find any cases. I wondered why this didn't happen a while ago, and got an answer: they are terrified that the US government will hunt them down if they do this.
