Simon Willison’s Weblog

At the start of the year, most people loosely following AI probably knew of 0 [Chinese] AI labs. Now, and towards wrapping up 2025, I’d say all of DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are becoming household names. They all have seasons of their best releases and different strengths. The important thing is this’ll be a growing list. A growing share of cutting edge mindshare is shifting to China. I expect some of the likes of Z.ai, Meituan, or Ant Ling to potentially join this list next year. For some of these labs releasing top tier benchmark models, they literally started their foundation model effort after DeepSeek. It took many Chinese companies only 6 months to catch up to the open frontier in ballpark of performance, now the question is if they can offer something in a niche of the frontier that has real demand for users.

— Nathan Lambert, 5 Thoughts on Kimi K2 Thinking