Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 is the next Chinese name to make a splash in Western media. It ranks alongside the frontier models from Claude and ChatGPT, and that alone is a feat.

The naysayers say it was achieved through distillation and the like. Maybe. But if it were that easy, every lab would be doing it and every model would be frontier class.Being frontier

is one thing. Cost is another. Claude is known to be expensive. ChatGPT has managed to bring its costs down. Kimi K3 still comes in more than 50% cheaper than ChatGPT. As good as the West, at a fraction of the price. For cost conscious users, that is reason enough to switch.It also remains a few years behind its U.S. and Korean peers technologically. Strict export controls mean it cannot easily acquire extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment, forcing it to rely on less efficient domestic workarounds to push into advanced 10 nanometre class processes.

But Apple is willing to consider its chips. That tells you the quality is already good enough.Then there is Apple. It is facing soaring memory component costs as data centre AI demand soaks up supply. It is now testing DRAM from CXMT and lobbying Washington for approval to use those chips in devices sold in China.

A few years ago the consensus was simple. China was about ten years behind the West in semiconductors, and Washington’s plan was to keep it that way by cutting off access to the most advanced chips and the machines that make them.

Well, well, well.

China’s answer was to build it itself. And over the past few weeks, three separate developments suggest the gap is a lot narrower than anyone wanted to admit.