Between Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4: Why Native Multimodal Capability Defines the Next Phase of Chinese Frontier Models

Moonshot AI Kimi K3, Alibaba Qwen3.8-Max, and ByteDance Doubao-Seed-2.1 commit to native multimodal training while DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Tencent Hunyuan stay text-only as vision-in-the-loop becomes decisive for long agent tasks.