According to Bloomberg, the less well-known side of China's AI company has set its annualized revenue target for the end of this year at $2 billion. This figure is approximately twice its revenue level in August, indicating that the company is attempting to convert the popularity of the Kimi and K3 models into more stable business revenue.

K3 Pushes Up Revenue Targets

The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the more prominent large-scale model companies in China. Reports mention that since the release of K3 this summer, it has become a major product driving up revenue expectations. Although usage has slightly declined in recent months, data from OpenRouter shows that the K3 series of models can still generate as many as 300 billion token per day on that platform.

The open-source weighting model is an important characteristic of the dark side of the moon. Unlike closed-weighting models, the parameters of these models can be publicly obtained, making them easier for developers to deploy and reuse, and thus more likely to be widely adopted.

There is still a gap compared to leading companies in the United States.

However, the commercial returns of this model are usually not as good as those of the closed-source models. Reports indicate that since the model weights are freely accessible, the profit margins of "The Dark Side of the Moon" are lower than those of its closed-source competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Nevertheless, the company is still raising its revenue targets, indicating that open-source weight models still possess considerable monetization potential.

In terms of revenue scale, there is still a significant gap between "The Dark Side of the Moon" and the top AI companies in the United States. Recent reports indicate that the revenue scale of OpenAI is approximately $40 billion, while that of Anthropic is around $65 billion. In comparison, "The Dark Side of the Moon's" target of $2 billion is still in a lower range.

Model training methods are once again controversial

Meanwhile, the dark side of the moon has also recently become involved in model training controversies. Anthropic accused the company earlier this week of engaging in long-term model distillation and claimed that Kimi directly forwarded nearly 300,000 requests to Claude Opus, with the latter actually handling the responses.

Anthropic also mentioned that 'The Dark Side of the Moon' has accumulated over 23 million responses from its models, and these have been used for training purposes. If the relevant allegations continue to develop, both the commercial advancement pace of 'The Dark Side of the Moon' and its expectations for external cooperation could be affected.