Moonshot AI: Spooking the giants
Just as a long-standing global giant such as Volkswagen has woken up to discover that its lunch is being wolfed down by its upstart Chinese rival, so the AI giants might take a moment away from pouring untold billions into their models to sneak a peek over the shoulder and see what’s hurrying in their direction.
Andrew Marvell was concerned that “at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near”, but even that may not be as alarming as the noise coming from Moonshot.
The company was founded only in 2023 by three classmates at Tsinghua University, on the 50th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.
The plan was to build foundation models to achieve artificial general intelligence, and the three-year-old company is reported to be raising funds from heavyweight investors such as Alibaba and Tencent at a valuation of over $30bn, a fraction of Anthropic’s $965bn or OpenAI’s $852bn, but not exactly an insignificant number for a start-up.
The reason for all the excitement is the launch of its latest large language model, Kimi K3, complete with data that suggests it beats Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 on most benchmarks, with only Anthropic’s Fable keeping its nose in front.
The consensus used to be that Chinese AI models were eight to 12 months behind US models, but the gap seems to be narrowing swiftly, while the Chinese models remain significantly cheaper than the Americans’. For investors looking at the vast quantities of dollars the Americans are investing, it’s a concern.
Netflix: Chill in the stream
It hasn’t been a happy year for investors in the streaming giant, with the share price dropping 44%, founder Reed Hastings stepping down to spend more time with his philanthropies, and a sharp retreat from its attempt to take over Warner Bros Discovery.
Its third-quarter projection of 11.7% year-on-year growth is a long way from a disaster, but it’s the lowest growth number in three years and Wall Street gave it a proper spanking, taking its share price down almost 10% in the day.
The company seemed happier with its performance than the Street did, saying that price increases had gone well, driving revenue up 13% year on year, and viewing hours had grown by 2% in the first half to an astonishing 97-billion hours, evidence that thousands of years of evolution have led to the once-proud hunter-gatherers of Homo sapiens becoming a largely sofa-based species.
Netflix has been promoting its lower-priced advertising-supported membership tier, allowing it to target markets and users that are priced out of its fully paid service, and doubling its advertising revenue to around $3bn this year.
The real problem for the company is the sheer quantity of competitors who have muscled into the streaming arena since Netflix demonstrated the potential of the sector.
This would be a serious issue if the consumer acted rationally and subscribed to one streamer at a time, binged it vigorously and then moved on to the next, but fortunately for Netflix the man in the street is far too idle and disorganised to operate such a ruthless policy, and the subscriptions continue.