Maybe, but people keep acting like “free and open-source-ish” automatically wins. Enterprises still care about trust, support, compliance, and whether the model randomly hallucinates a contract clause into a legal mess. Cheap is nice, but if a bank can’t get indemnity or security guarantees, they’re not just gonna dump OpenAI tomorrow.

Honestly this feels like the market doing what it always does: pricing in scarcity until someone ships a cheaper substitute. If Kimi K3 is actually competitive on coding, then the moat for the big US labs looks a lot thinner than the bulls assumed. Not necessarily doom, but the premium SaaS-style margins people were modeling may need a reality check.

If the Chinese models keep getting cheaper and good enough, the whole “AI stock = endless pricing power” thesis gets shaky fast. Open source-ish + lower cost + local deployment is exactly what enterprise buyers like. The market may be overestimating how sticky these margins are. That said, benchmarks aren’t the whole story — reliability, security, and integration matter a lot when real businesses are on the line.