[AINews] Much ado about Open Weights

Everyone say hi to Richard MacManus, our new Head of Editorial!

The current debate about Open Weights is the kind that creates a lot of grandstanding on a topic, while they wait for a very small set of players that will actually decide how things go (in either direction); this is not very conducive for those of us trying to focus on high signal to noise.

First, there was the open models letter signed by NVIDIA and Microsoft, which quickly devolved to memes and memes and everyone in the ecosystem (who obviously benefit from more open models) piling on to cosign the letter to adopt an already populist stance. Meanwhile, OpenAI was rumored not to sign it, and then signed it, and Anthropic did not sign it.

All very predictable, and all somewhat exhausting.

Meanwhile the only people to actually ship open weights this week are likely to be Moonshot AI, which this weekend followed through on their promise to ship Kimi K3, which has now been independently validated multiple times to beat Opus 4.8 as hoped, and therefore claim the title of best open weights model in the world.

If you don’t make law, make chips, or make models, we recommend reading the Kimi K3 tech report rather than 50 tweets of low-perplexity invective by the commentariat to the proletariat.

AI News for 7/25/2026-7/27/2026. We checked 12 subreddits, 544 Twitters and no further Discords. AINews’ website lets you search all past issues. As a reminder, AINews is now a section of Latent Space. You can opt in/out of email frequencies!

AI Twitter Recap

Moonshot’s Kimi K3 Open-Weights Release and the New 3T-Class Open Frontier

• Kimi K3 is the day’s dominant release: Moonshot released Kimi K3 weights, report, and supporting infra as an open-weights package: a 2.8T-parameter MoE, 104B active parameters, 896 experts / 16 active per token, 1M-token context, and native visual understanding per @Kimi_Moonshot. The companion posts also open-source FlashKDA (their Kimi Delta Attention kernels), MoonEP (MoE communication…