OpenAI-backed legal tech firm pivots to Chinese Kimi K3 open-weight model
A US artificial intelligence start-up backed by OpenAI has built its first in-house model on Chinese lab Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, highlighting a growing shift by Western tech firms towards Chinese open-weight systems amid soaring development costs. San Francisco-based legal tech provider Harvey, whose high-profile backers also include Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, said on Thursday that…
US artificial intelligence start-up Harvey, backed by OpenAI, has unveiled its latest model, Harvey Tenet, built on the open-weight Chinese system Kimi K3 developed by Chinese lab Moonshot AI. This shift highlights the trend of Western tech firms moving towards Chinese open-weight models due to rising development costs. Harvey, founded in 2022 and valued at $11 billion in March, initially customized closed proprietary models from US leaders like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google for legal applications.
However, the company's pivot to open-weight models, post-trained with specialised legal data, resulted in "state-of-the-art" performance in complex legal tasks. The training for Harvey Tenet, using 150 Nvidia B300 GPUs, took two months. Harvey emphasizes cost efficiency, as open-weight models offer lower per token prices and reduced token consumption in inference.
Other companies, such as AT&T, are also exploring Chinese open-weight models, though they are still evaluating and assessing potential risks.
Written by urgent.news from South China Morning Post's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
