CURATED TIMELINE · EDITORIAL EDITION
Follow the market’s shifts from bilingual chat models and hyperscaler-backed open families to sparse MoE efficiency, controllable reasoning, and long-context products across ChatGLM, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Kimi.
Timeline overview
Editorial thread
Reviewed event briefs and original editorial context, ordered to show how the story changed over time.
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, 2026, as a 2.8-trillion-parameter multimodal model with a one-million-token context window. Its products and API launched that day; the full weights followed in a separate open-source event on July 27.
Z.ai released GLM-5.2 for long-horizon agent tasks, with a stable one-million-token context window and MIT-licensed open weights.
Z.ai releases GLM-4.5, a 355-billion-parameter MoE model with updated expert routing and improved long-form structure generation.
Moonshot AI's trillion-parameter MoE model, continuing its emphasis on lossless recall across a very long context window.
Qwen3 combines fast direct answers and longer reasoning in one open-weight family, spanning dense and MoE models up to a 235B flagship.
DeepSeek publishes R1, R1-Zero, six distilled models, and its reinforcement-learning recipe, pushing open reasoning models into the frontier conversation.
DeepSeek releases a 671B MoE model with 37B active parameters, open weights, low API prices, and unusually detailed efficiency disclosures.
Qwen2.5 spans small local models through a 72B flagship, with stronger instruction following and specialist code and math editions.
