This past week, two state-of-the-art (SOTA) foundation models were launched: Moonshot Labs' Kimi K3[1] and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8[2]. Both are allegedly close to Anthropic's Fable 5 in performance, and both will have their model weights released publicly in the coming weeks. Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 represent a strategic challenge to top-tier model developers and what they'll need to do to compete moving forward. They prove that the SOTA frontier is possible to attain with open models, and this represen...