Goldman Sachs: After the release of Kimi K3, Zhipu Minimax plunges sharply, signaling the end of the era of computing power monopolies

Deep Tide TechFlow message: According to tide-trend research, a July 18 report from Goldman Sachs said that the Dark Side of the Moon has released the Kimi K3 model with 2.8 trillion parameters. On the Arena.ai programming leaderboard, it surpassed Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol to take the top spot, with API pricing at $2.3 per million tokens—setting a new high for Chinese models. Two days after the release, Zhipu AI fell 28%, MiniMax fell 16%, Nasdaq 100 index futures dropped by more than 1.8%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell cumulatively by more than 18% from its peak.

Goldman Sachs believes Kimi K3 marks a turning point: through architectural innovation and reinforcement learning, a Chinese lab that cannot match the West’s largest-scale pretrained compute has quickly narrowed the gap with top U.S. models, proving that “scaling” is no longer the only winning path. Goldman Sachs warned that the “compute expansion era” may be coming to an end, and that the investment logic for AI infrastructure built on “the more compute, the better” needs to be rewritten. Goldman Sachs maintains a Buy rating on MiniMax, while Zhipu AI is Neutral. Next, watch for the intensive launch of 2–5 trillion-parameter models such as Zhipu’s GLM, Alibaba’s Qwen, and MiniMax M3 Pro.