Altman on Kimi K3: OpenAI Is the Better Value at Certain Speeds
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed Moonshot AI's open-weight flagship, Kimi K3, on the Invest Like the Best podcast, where the host called it the most notable AI release of the week and pressed Altman on whether it would become a DeepSeek-style milestone.
Altman didn't directly answer whether Kimi K3 is a milestone, and he offered no capability comparison. Instead, he stressed that OpenAI wants to offer the best-value model at every speed and price tier — and that under specific latency requirements, OpenAI is currently the better deal than Kimi. He didn't specify which models, prices, or test conditions he was referring to.
Altman did acknowledge that cheap models and open-weight models will be around for a long time. Some users need to deploy and modify weights themselves, he said, which is why open-source models will always have a market. OpenAI will also distill its own large models into smaller, cheaper ones.
As for worries that competitors might distill OpenAI's models, Altman said that doesn't crack his top ten list of concerns. He believes OpenAI will face enormous inference demand in the future, and even if profit margins are thin, the revenue scale should be enough to keep funding expensive model training.