New Delhi, Aug. 11 -- The world of technology was shaken when Chinese startup Moonshot recently unveiled its artificial intelligence (AI) model Kimi K3. Astoundingly, it compared well with similar American products on many measures. Domain experts were surprised to find that it was perhaps only weeks behind comparable US platforms.

But what really shook Big AI was the realization that Kimi K3 had been built with open-source software, thereby costing a fraction of what its big models took, and was released as an open-weight model; this not only allows cheaper access, it also lets users tweak its nuts and bolts on their own to customize it for specific usage.

While Washington has imposed export curbs on US-based developers in an ironic re...