In the early hours of July 17, 2026, Elon Musk replied "Impressive" to an Artificial Analysis review about Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, a model with a parameter scale of 2.8 trillion, making it the world's largest open-source weight model and ranking third globally behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. The next day, Musk commented that xAI's 2-trillion-parameter model "could surpass Kimi," and Moonshot AI responded on Weibo: "Welcome to the '2 Trillion+' club." On July 19, Kimi announced that since launch, "user requests over the past 48 hours have far exceeded expectations and are approaching the load limit of the existing cluster," prompting suspension of new C-end user subscriptions. That same week, news broke that DeepSeek V4 had started gray-scale testing with a scheduled release at the end of July; its preview version had 1.6 trillion parameters, with API input price of $0.435 and output price of $0.87 per million tokens. Artificial Analysis' standardized evaluation shows K3 spends an average of $0.94 on a weighted evaluation task, while V4 Pro costs about $0.04—a difference of roughly 23.5 times. During the 2026 Chinese New Year, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent collectively poured tens of billions of yuan into AI products: ByteD