Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya says a new open-source AI release from China may mark a turning point in the global AI race, as it threatens the position of popular chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
In a new episode of the All-In Podcast, Palihapitiya says the launch of Kimi K 2.5 represents a direct challenge to closed-source frontier models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
He says the Chinese open-source model is a tectonic shift away from proprietary control toward mass accessibility, driven by a model architecture that had previously been locked behind corporate walls.
Open-source models are often free, with better transparency and privacy as user data is stored on local servers. Meanwhile, closed-source models come with costs, and user data is processed on third-party servers.
Says Palihapitiya,
“So this week, you wake up, you go to the office, and Kimi K 2.5 is important. So this is why it’s so important, because it was incredibly profound. It’s a trillion-parameter mixture of expert models. When you farm out work, the proprietary models keep that agentic layer kind of secret. Kimi K 2.5 was like, ‘Okay, look, here’s this thing called Agent Swarm. It’s a technology that we built.’
That’s also now public. And it allows you to create all 100 sub-agents. And what that allows you to do is basically solve any complicated multi-step problem in parallel.”
Kimi K 2.5 is from China’s Moonshot AI that understands text, image and video. It outperforms GPT 5.2 and Gemini Pro 3 on a coding benchmark and beats GPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5 on a video benchmark.
According to Palihapitiya, the emergence of a competitive open-source model is a game-changer in the AI model war.
“I think this is the moment now if I had to make a prediction, I think there is a clear shot across the bow of closed source. And I think open source can win.
Why?
Because when Kimi K 2.5 is accessible, it democratizes something this trillion-parameter reasoning that right now you could not otherwise get. Now you can do vision to code, you can do massive context windows. It’s really unbelievable. And it’s available to everybody.”
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