China's open-weight AI models are now just 4 months behind frontier US offerings, Mozilla report claims — models still lag in some benchmarks but are drastically cheaper to use
Mozilla’s State of Open Source AI report puts Kimi K3 about four months behind closed frontier models at 30% of the price.
Mozilla's State of Open Source AI report, published on September 15, indicates that many of the leading Chinese open-weight AI models are now just four months behind the forefront U.S. offerings. The best open model trails the closed leader by three points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, scoring 60% of the price and lagging behind Claude Fable 5 by two points.
Mozilla estimates the open-closed gap at approximately 4.4 months, consistent with Epoch AI's four-month projection. The data for this assessment is current as of September 1, based on a Mozilla/SlashData survey of roughly 1,400 developers, OpenRouter traffic data, and third-party benchmark indices. Mozilla advocates for open models, and Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla's chief technology officer, views the report as partly advocacy.
Despite the four-month gap and a 30% token price difference measured API to API on hosted endpoints, Mozilla's hardware assessment reveals a larger gap. The best open model that fits one server scores 52.6, while the best on one GPU scores 40, a 10 and 23 point difference respectively.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
