Kimi K3

Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI startup, released Kimi K3 a week ago, with plans to release the weights and runtime of the model on the 27th. It’s a 2.8 trillion parameter model (with 50B active parameters per token, using 16 active experts of the 896 available) that shows excellent results on benchmarks, coming within touching distance of Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s 5.6 Sol.

Which is incredible. Clearly a model of this size doesn’t run on your consumer GPU1, but it does legitimately democratize access to highly capable models. Further it will prove as the foundation for a lot of distillation2 tasks, improving the state of the art among smaller specialized models.

It’s another Deepseek moment that has Anthropic and OpenAI running to demand daddy prohibit the competition3, while the hardware and data centre makers are arguing otherwise4. AI models are already reaching the “diminishing returns” point for a lot of tasks, where the absolute best of the best model isn’t an enormous jump from much cheaper models for many uses, so it’s to be seen how this impacts the market.

And it’s worth noting that China isn’t oblivious to what they have here, and similarly is suddenly talking about export controls5. Hopefully the K3 weight release does happen, but I suspect we might not see such benevolence from China in the future. And it is absolutely true that China’s domestic “AI” chip production has gotten extremely competitive in every dimension, and this is a realm that the US no longer has any monopoly over. Successive US administrations trying to use GPUs to coerce China only served to massively accelerate its domestic industry.

Shortly after K3 was announced Anthropic removed their time-gating on Fable6 – they originally thought it would be their moneymaker, and they would give out just a little taste before charging per token – and I suspect it made them hasten the release of Opus 5.

And to be fair Opus 5 looks great. It is a deeply impressive model. But it only slightly pips an open-weight model, and that is an extraordinary moment.

This is important because trillions of dollars are being dumped7 into the US AI industry in the belief that it will be such a massive competitive advantage that they’ll have the world by the throat. Repeatedly this narrative has been destroyed, and as the point of diminishing returns is scaled the horizon for this ever happening dissolves.

USMCA

Canada should begin the 6-month process to exit USMCA. The trade deal is untenable, and now that the US is a bad actor in every respect8, it’s time to decouple. It is effectively a dead agreement already given all the actions the US has taken over the prior year, in absolute violation of the pact. For some reason we like to pretend that Canada and Mexico are close allies in this agreement, but not only is Mexico almost meaningless to Canada from a trade perspective, they’re actually why Canada’s auto industry has collapsed, and have worked against Canada repeatedly in these negotiations.

Canada does send most of its exports to the US as a geographical happenstance, and decoupling will be painful. We should have taken more efforts to prepare in the past year, and there is a recurring tendency of parties to assume at some point the US will return to being a rational country, which is folly. There are plenty of other markets, and in reality the vast bulk of Canada’s economy is internal trade, and what we lose in exports to the US we should satisfy by domestically replacing what we import from them, completely replacing states like Ohio as suppliers of anything.

And of course the US isn’t going to stop buying Canadian oil. While Trump keeps yipping about the trade deficit, somehow he never applies a single restriction or tariff on oil from Canada, and if anything has done everything to increase the flow. Almost like it’s all just bullshit. Canada needs to exert its resource controls and implement an export tax on oil that the US has always enjoyed at a massive discount, taking advantage that Canada didn’t prepare to export to other customers. Only now we can, and the “ally” discount certainly doesn’t apply to a shithole that constantly sees members of government threatening or maligning us.

Bring back the Digital Service Tax. Start enforcement actions against Meta and X and every other cancerous bit of American idiocracy exports, and purge Microsoft, Google, Oracle and others from every bit of government infrastructure. Punt every US corporation exploiting Canada under the framework we gave them in USMCA, and abolish every resource “first taker option” this gave US importers for Canadian resources under the agreement. Giving even an iota to this corrupt group of bullies was always folly, and it’s one criticism I have of the current government: They, like the fallen UK, thought they could pander to the US and limit the chaos and ride it out, not realizing how profound the insanity is in that cluster of simpletons.

And just to understand how we’re here, understand that the foolish orange-faced rug-pull simpleton – the rapist that the US public decided was their best choice of leader, acting as a tell on where US society is at now – has failed so spectacularly in every domestic action that he’s firmly in the “rob the rest of the world” realm now. Hence the endless wars and murdering, piracy, terrorism, and the continual need to look like he’s winning by bullying other countries in a Pyrrhic way that only harms the US.

How disgusting, and what a pariah the US has become. I get that Americans like to just shrug and say that they voted for the other guy, etc, but in the end Trump is the ultimate display of what an American is in 2026, and how profoundly pathetic and sad.

Forest Fires

In a recent post I complained about the government’s response to the forest fires, and I just want to be absolutely clear: Unlike the incredibly stupid political class in the US (again, what an abject idiocracy, and how are the people voting for such a cluster of dipshits and murderous garbage grifters? Let’s not forget foolish opportunistic Trump-supplicant shitbirds like Bernie Moreno in this9), I’m not under delusions that they can “thin” or rake or “manage”10 almost a billion acres of forests to prevent the threat global warming and a changed environment has presented (higher heats and drier summer, often with blustery winds == bad news). Endless forest fires are a new reality, and my position was more “how are we going to deal with them more aggressively when they inevitably do occur”. That we should be having hearings and open discussions and brain storming about the way forward.

As we’ve seen across the world, and indeed throughout the US at this very moment, blanketing Western Canada with US smog (for which I guess we’ll have to make a “victim compensation fund”11): forest fires are becoming a profound threat everywhere. And as I conspiratorially noted in my prior post, not just for natural events, but also for bad actors like the likely arsonists Bernie “Forest Firebug” Moreno, along with his Michigan “Sovereignty Comes With Responsibility” Republican friends. Likely arsonists, the lot of them.

My complaint was more that there doesn’t seem to be any haste in how to respond to these fires. That we – society in general, including the non-moronic parts of the US (which excludes any area that votes for human shit like Bernie Moreno) – need to seriously discuss how we’re going to deal with this going forward, because it isn’t sustainable to just hope that they’re exceptions when they’re becoming the norm. It’s not unlike areas where “500 year floods” are happening every other year, at which point you should probably recalculate the risk profile.

On China

There have been a number of polls recent revealing that much of the world has a more favourable opinion of China than the US. This keeps getting reported on in the US press like it’s some crazy stat, betraying how silly and gullible the rest of the world is compared to the imagination of America they hold in their delusions. Doesn’t everyone realize how great the US is compared to those crazy Kommies?

Which country voted an incredibly stupid rapist halfwit, self-dealing grifter to represent them in world affairs? A foolish clown that thinks having tantrums and acting like an emotional toddler12 is leadership? Who has repeatedly threatened nuclear attacks or “wiping out” civilizations, and then brags that being a “wildcard” is some great strategy? A felon whose busted, simpleton brain seems to have stopped absorbing new information in the early 1980s, so every idiotic utterance sounds like some sort of decrepit time-capsule from a grade-school dropout uncle? Railing about windmills and coal and whatever other demented, stupid utterances flow from his vile, hateful lips.

And while Trump is obviously the peak example of the rapid US decline, similar human refuse can be found littering the entire US political class: Just play on some racial grievance and get a foolish, death-cult culture to vote for you (Bernie Moreno, Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, that football coach imbecile, and many more).

Which country is currently engaging in wanton piracy and terrorism? Which country is bombing endless countries, deposing governments, and undermining democracies across the world? Which country has been trying to starve out Cuba for decades for the crime of not being a US friend?

Iran is a brutal fundy theocratic pariah, but the US has fallen so far and so fast that for much of the world the current US imperialistic “go and murder lots of people” engagement is one where we’d like it if both sides could lose. Iran didn’t improve their image to make this happen, but instead the US fell so far that it’s now a wash. Having the stunningly incompetent and unqualified Pete “Fox News Dipshit” Kegsbreath coming out and giving his farcical ChatGPT-written tough-guy speeches doesn’t improve this situation.

Brazil recently blocked some US “election monitors”. I mean, does anyone think the US is concerned about democracy, or that they’re really on its side? The US is the world’s biggest threat to democracy, and is trying to impose its ignorance-adulating, hatred-fuelled idiocracy, providing an opening for the kleptocrats to ply their ways. Do Americans really think having a president and his crew of losers only questioning democracy when it doesn’t go their (or their allies in grift) way is pro-democracy? These people hate democracy, and they’ll lever stupid and foolish people against themselves to dismantle it.

These “election monitors” serve the sole purpose of undermining democracy in any case where whatever corrupt, rapist shitbird13 Trump likes best doesn’t win. It’s transparently obvious, but everyone is still playing along.

Which country is currently trying to fracture Canada, and actually has been for decades? That has high-ranking officials openly fomenting the invasion of literal allies?

Which country’s word on treaties and agreements is utterly worthless? Which country now vilifies education and celebrates ignorance? Where a foolish idiot like Nick Shirley or close Trump admin friend Andrew Tate somehow can obtain a platform and a fan base?

Which country is basically lawless, where the president is pardoning rapists and thieves and drug dealers for bribes, and where the plutocrats and special interests utterly own almost all of your politicians, on both sides of the aisle? Recently Michigan Democrats, supplicant servants of their bosses US automakers, came together to propose a bill to ban Chinese cars from Canada from entering the US14 (Mexico has loads of these cars for years, and it never got any concern, but the moment Canada started allowing some of them given the current trade war, the automakers got worried). Weirdly they didn’t have say a peep when Herr Trump, the orange goblin, started his attack on Canada’s auto manufacturing, declaring that we shouldn’t have an auto industry. If that’s the case, then fine we’ll buy from China and Europe you festering cancer on humanity.

Recently the US imposed a new “forced labour” tariff on many countries – this was the replacement for the illegal prior “liberation day” tariffs – and there was an article in the Canadian press by some silly guy complaining that Canada didn’t send reps to fight it in some kangaroo court farcical hearing the US held. I mean, did he think those hearings were serious? Is there some delusion that the administration in the US is anything other than a lawless farce at this point, and where such things are just a comical misuse of prior statutes to impose an idiotic, self-destructive economic policy? Or to desperately try to save face for the felonious rapist and his band of ChatGPT fools?

There are loads of things seriously wrong with China, from its government, to its crushing of dissent, the whole Uyghurs thing, the ridiculous nine- or ten-line claim to sea that clearly isn’t China’s, and the relatively non-violent conflict with neighbours over it, and so on. China has also become a massive greenhouse gas emitter, and while the “per capita” argument carries a bit of weight, and they have been deploying enormous amounts of renewable energy, putting thousands of massive coal-burning plants online long after we knew the consequences isn’t great.

Compared to the US, however? Wow, an absolute panacea. Garbage like Nick Shirley gets no platform there. Education is revered and respected. Transport systems, high speed rail, universal healthcare in a hyper-efficient healthcare system absent the endless layers of rent-seekers that you see in America, from which you get a lifespan that has already left the US in the dust. China correctly kept cancerous US exports like Meta and Twitter away, to their benefit, and when someone is a weird despicable creep like some of the US’ kleptocrats, they don’t do well. The whole “Epstein circle” would come to very unpleasant ends in China, where in America they’re your leadership class.

China isn’t bombing anyone. While they do interfere with other nations, it isn’t in the service of a foolish rapist or his plutocrat friends. It isn’t to forward the interests of bizarre creeps like Peter “AntiChrist” Thiel.

Neither are great world leaders, but on the whole China absolutely nets out better than the US. Which is exactly how almost all the world sees it now.

Which you would think would be worrying for Americans, whose wealth, safety, and way of life has relied upon its allies15, most of whom have people who have a better opinion of China than the fallen United States. Ooops, sounds like time for various “Football Coach” politicians in the US to send invasion threats or warn that you’ll destroy people’s economies because you disagree with them. That should do the trick!

I have a lot of good American friends and business associates. I have been a frequent visitor and fan of great American cities like NYC and Minneapolis, and as I previously discussed most of my ancestry comes through the US. I know the country has a lot of great people and has done enormously good things for humanity. But right now you are a worldwide joke, and by far the most dangerous rogue nation on the planet. Of course we feel better about China.

Fix your situation, because it only gets worse from here. Your country has been subjugated by both inbred methville shitholes16, special interests that buy your politicians, along with insane plutocrat garbage like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Your window to correct this mistake is short.

Whether that means dissolution, some sort of new federalism where a crime spree like the Trump administration cannot happen again, “blue” states withholding federal revenue, etc. It is at crisis levels, and after this equities bubble bursts and “tHe DoW iS aT 5o,OoO” can’t distract the foolish rubes, the consequences of this crime spree will be clear.

51st State

Whenever Canadians critique America, invariably the reflexive action by Americans is some sort of “you hate us cuz you ain’t us” bit, then boasting about military spending or guns or other such pathetic nonsense, or telling us how if you average out your plutocrat overlord’s wealth, you’re so much richer. I mean, you understand that your peeps keep begging us to join, and when that is grossly unpopular here, transition to threatening to force us to join, right? Do you understand how that annihilates your delusions? It’s the rapist telling his victim how much she wants him (fair analogy given that the US is being led by a literal rapist who surrounded himself with similar Epstein Island trash like Howard Nutlick, who in a country like China would long have been dealt with).

I lament every way that Canada is like the US. Car centric culture sucks. Selfish, greedy culture sucks. “I got mine” culture sucks. Incel, pickup-truck culture sucks. Ignorance heralding sucks.

I have infinitely more interest in Nordic culture and social norms. Even Chinese norms are far more compelling. If American culture is the end game, I’d rather live in China.

And honestly, maybe it’s for that reason we should be thankful for Trump. He laid it out so bare – he is too stupid to cover for it – that the utter endemic corruption of US politics, and the complete dysfunction of the country, is no longer shrouded. It is a thoroughly subjugated country, acting as a servile, foolish supplicant for a few special interests. The lawlessness, war crimes, endless murdering and imperialism no longer gets a pass.

For that, I guess, we should be thankful. The emperor truly has no clothes.

Footnotes

  1. It would require something like 48 H200s to hold the model, KV cache and context window, though the Kimi Delta Attention innovation reduces some of the hardware demands. ↩

  2. The American model vendors have repeatedly claimed that these Chinese models are but an illusion17. That really American exceptionalism is at play, and the only way these models perform so well is by covertly distilling from the American leaders. To support this they’ve released some relatively chickenshit tiny numbers, from which nothing competitive could possibly be created.

    No, they didn’t make Kimi K3 by distillation, and the notion is fantastically dumb (not least that they made a Fable-level model before Fable was available). It would take unfathomable levels of spend to try to distill a competitive model through the APIs.

    Could they have fine-tuned or done QC by comparing against the SOTA models? Of course they did, just as I guarantee the vendors do against each other.

    The core LLM technologies are pretty well known now, everyone has giant archives of every bit of text and code from all of human history, etc, and the bulk of recent model research/innovation has come from China. That China is now deeply competitive isn’t remotely surprising, and this American delusion that it’s all a mirage is some serious cope to try to fool the rubes. ↩

  3. There once was a time when the US could elicit cooperation with allies on actions like this. Yeah, absolutely no one will follow the US down that protectionist road. Okay maybe the sad and fallen UK will, pathetically acting like a US lapdog as they desperately try to hang off US coattails.

    Bribe the rapist and you might stop Americans from access to these great Chinese models, but the rest of the world will laugh at your protectionism and evolve without you. ↩

  4. You can be sure loads of bribes are happening behind the scenes, as the US has become a hyper-corrupt shithole that elects grifter pedos to the highest office. ↩

  5. This Reuters report has been refuted by some sources in the know, so it could just be manufactured drama. ↩

  6. GPT-5.6 Sol might have made even more of an impact. Suddenly the mythical secret sauce evaporated. ↩

  7. Oracle’s bonds are now basically at junk level, SpaceX debt is being sold at a discount, and there are untold amounts of borrowing shrouded in SPVs. It is a massive, historic house-of-cards that relies upon eventually being able to turn this into a big moneymaker, in such a way that the riches somehow blanket countless massively indebted corporations.

    It is not an overstatement to say that the entire US market entirely relies upon this bet achieving the most fantastically optimistic, and basically impossible, levels of income. ↩

  8. In announcing their latest “50% tariff” – clearly annoyed that Canada was willing to just wait out this garbage Epstein administration, so they pivoted to trying to death-pact a forced agreement through such foolish brinksmanship – the US complained that Canada tariffs US vehicles. Which is hilarious stuff, because it’s exactly the same tariffs the US applies to Canadian vehicles, in complete and utter violation of the “Best Trade Deal” that the same orange pedo clown signed in in his first term. In fact, it’s even more generous given that Canada gave a “tariff-free” quota before they even kick in.

    And again they complain about dairy. The same dairy that we gave considerable concessions for in the first agreement, because they can continually pull the wool over the eyes of the ignorant American public. ↩

  9. Moreno represents Ohio, a state entirely reliant upon exports to Canada. Yeah, tariff us you foolish loser. See how that works out. ↩

  10. There are forest management practices in high risk areas right near human settlements (thinning, controlled burns, etc). This has zero relevance to the billion acres of extremely remote, far-flung forests. ↩

  11. I mean, the root cause of all of this is greenhouse gases and global warming, for which the US is by far the largest contributor (China temporarily holds the lead, but the US is undeniably who got us here). I guess it’s time for a victim compensation fund and every country should be fining every American corporation billions. ↩

  12. Three quarters of US foreign affairs are now based on whatever emotional tantrum answer the Orange Goblin gives to a press that easily baits him into saying stupid nonsense. And because he’s a simpleton, he’ll then triple down on whatever catastrophically stupid position he espoused at the moment, using all of his addled, worthless brainpower. ↩

  13. Like that weird Milei creep in Argentina, who has spectacularly failed at turning the country around, despite Trump and Musk doing everything they can to prop up that basket case, and whose boosters will, much like Trump’s pathetic circus, just blame prior governments for time eternal. ↩

  14. Meaning if Canadians buy them, they couldn’t drive them over the border for day trips, vacations, etc. Which…what an empty threat. ↩

  15. NATO18 has only ever been invoked to defend the US. NORAD, where Canada and the US work together for the air defence of North America, is often held by US politicians as some benevolence towards Canada, for which we owe reparations. Are you serious? No one is going to attack Canada – I mean, the sole threat we actually have is the US – and NORAD exists to extend the US’ range of defence for Russian bombers that would be coming for American targets. NORAD exists as Canadian welfare towards the US.

    Much of the world hates the US. They don’t hate Canada. We aren’t in these alliances for our own self-defence you silly foolish cretins, just like we entered both of the world wars long before the US did, and before they bombed a single Canadian base or property. ↩

  16. There is some realtor couple from Texas that posts social media videos of them showing homes, and in each they’re carrying assault rifles. The comments are full of smooth-brained Americans doing a “hell ya!” act.

    Hell ya? What sort of busted third world shithole thinks this sort of nonsense is tough or good? If your country needs you to walk around your suburb with a rifle, you might just live in a busted dystopia, and maybe you should do something about that. Thinking it is something to brag about is pathetic business. ↩

  17. When models are released invariably people ask the model its identity, and think it’s a big tell when some random model says it is some other model. This is literally meaningless data, and you know someone has no idea what they’re talking about when they cite it. For instance did you know that Anthropic models have often identified themselves as Qwen models if you query them in Chinese? Anthropic isn’t distilling from Qwen, probably, but in Chinese AI discussions the model was referenced a lot so it ends up in the training data. Which is why models are explicitly provided their “identity” via system prompts, and when they aren’t they’ll claim they’re whatever model was mentioned most in the reddit and HN discussions they trained on, etc. ↩

  18. NATO is Schrödinger’s military justification for US simpletons. Not only does it explain the outrageous military spending of the US and its endless “bomb random huts in developing nations” imperialism, withdrawing from the pact nets the savings of…spending $500B more on the military and boosting spending to $1.5T, in a country that objectively is heading to a near term bankruptcy. ↩