The China Question 🇨🇳🤖

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we ponder the significance of Kimi K3, a new Chinese-built AI model that has the White House and American AI companies on red alert. Will Donald Trump end up banning Chinese-built AI models? It’s possible. We also take a look at the app that takes gamification into the stratosphere, an AWS error that left customers with billion-dollar bills, how a GitHub user rebuilt one of Palantir’s core systems, and plenty more!

🎬 Our Top Take

🇨🇳🤖 AI – America Sounds the Alarm as Chinese Models Top Downloads

There might be a sense that we have been here before with cheap, powerful AI models coming from China – see the DeepSeek crisis – but this time feels a little different, particularly due to palpable concern coming from both the White House and Silicon Valley. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 Max are the two currently causing ‘concern’, with the former rocketing to the top of the charts of AI downloads and having to stop signups due to demand overload. Kimi K3 is claimed to be a massive 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, and while it might not be the world’s “best” AI model, it comes pretty close to the top new models from OpenAI and Claude. The problem? Kimi K3 is free, but even enterprise-level Chinese AI models come at a fraction of the cost, so that’s the reason tech and financial publications are printing the word “worried” in captions next to Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. The White House is springing to action, with reports that President Trump is ready to ban Chinese AI models in the US. It’s not just about price, either, as these models tend to be downloadable, open-weight, and more customizable for the businesses that use them. Surprisingly for Chinese tech products, they can also have less censorship and fewer guardrails. We’ll finish by simply recommending you read this article from MIT Technology Review, which gets to the heart of the bind that the US Government and AI companies find themselves in. #ChinaModels Read more here. 

📲 App of the Week: The Conqueror Challenges

We aren’t sure if we’d recommend The Conqueror Challenges, per se, but we wanted to highlight it as an example of an app that takes gamification for engagement to the extreme – like Duolingo on steroids. The app concept is based on fitness, challenging you to walk certain distances, for example. But the gamified element comes with where you walk to, copying the journey of Frodo Baggins and the Fellowship of the Ring to Mordor, for instance, or cycling the Seven Kingdoms à la Game of Thrones. There are rewards, both physical and virtual, and we really like that the app ties into your current fitness apps, like Strava. It’s free to download, but there are loads of in-app purchases pushed (hence our reluctance to recommend it outright). Still, if you’re interested in seeing how a business keeps customers (one million of them) ultra-engaged, you can check out the app here for iOS and here for Android.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 745,728,201,771%

📈📉 AWS – Billing Glitch Serves Users with Billion-Dollar Invoices

We all hate unexpected bills, right? But spare a thought for the Amazon Web Services customers, who received recent invoices for a lot more than expected. For instance, there was the UK man whose monthly AWS bill is usually £1 (about $1.35). His recent bill? £5.8 ($7.8B approx.). Another claimed his AWS invoice informed him that his usage rate was up 745,728,201,771%. These automation glitches can be funny – so ridiculously big in this case that you probably wouldn’t panic – but it’s the smaller, hard-to-notice errors that may be a bigger problem. #BigBills Read more here. 

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

So you’ve reached the end of our newsletter. You hopefully enjoyed it then! We’ve been running What’s Appening for around four and a half years and are considering its future. Should we keep going? Is it worth it? Is it time to wrap it up? We love seeing it come together, and it’s been a great way to keep in touch with all of you. We’d love to hear what you think, or if you’ve got any ideas to fund it moving forward. Sponsorship? New stewardship? Open to all your thoughts.

Of course, you could always support the newsletter by hiring us or referring us! 💚