🟣 EV Daily: Two Moonshots — one hit, one miss

Five things to know today + data of the week.

Lead story: Two Moonshots — one hit, one miss

Two headlines over the weekend capture the AI industry’s divergent tempos. In Beijing, Moonshot AI open-sourced Kimi K2, a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that tops GPT-4.1 on coding and math tests and is free to download. In San Francisco, OpenAI hit the brakes yet again, postponing its own open-weight release “indefinitely” for extra safety checks. The difference between approaches is stark. The insurgent treats cutting-edge capability as a public good, accelerating adoption and learning curves; the incumbent, wary of reputational and regulatory blow-back, keeps its crown jewels under wraps a little longer. The releases of DeepSeek R1 and Kimi K2 show how China’s open-source push is eroding the idea of durable moats. The only thing likely to slow that momentum now is the tightening grip of chip controls. [VentureBeat, TechCrunch] #AIModels

Key signals, quick scan

A 30-second scan of four secondary signals that hint at where the …