Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 model has been praised for its writing and coding abilities. Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty
Excitement is growing among researchers about a second, powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model to emerge from China, after DeepSeek shocked the world with its launch of R1 in January.
The performance of Kimi K2, launched on 11 July by Beijing-based company Moonshot AI, matches or surpasses that of Western rivals, as well as some DeepSeek models, across various benchmarks, according to the firm. In particular it appears to excel at coding, scoring high in tests such as LiveCodeBench, a way of evaluating AIs that challenges models on code-related tasks.
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As with DeepSeek’s models, Kimi K2 is open-weight, meaning it can be downloaded and built upon by researchers for free. It can also be accessed via an application programming interface (API) for a fraction of the price of leading proprietary models, such as Claude 4 from Anthropic, based in San Francisco, California.
“The community can freely use it, fine tune it and build on it without training their own model from scratch,” says Adina Yakefu, an AI researcher at the open-science platform Hugging Face. Just one day after its launch, Kimi K2 became downloaded at a rate higher than any other model on the platform, Hugging Face data show. Its release is “another ‘DeepSeek moment’”, Yakefu says.
Unlike many other powerful models, K2 is not a ‘reasoner’ — a model trained to approach queries using step-by-step logic. Instead, it specialises in being an agentic large language model (LLM), meaning it promises to carry out multi-step tasks using a variety of tools, for example browsing the web or calling upon mathematics software. Some models, including some versions of ChatGPT, can already do this, but they are proprietary. AI researchers are still checking whether they can replicate examples of agentic behaviour that Moonshot AI says Kimi K2 can do.
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Having a second impressive model emerge from China within six months suggests that the feat was not an anomaly. “The DeepSeek R1 release earlier this year was more of a prequel than a one-off fluke in the trajectory of AI,” wrote Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, in his newsletter, Interconnects. Kimi K2 is “the new best open model in the world”, he posted on the social media site Bluesky.
Moonshot AI, founded in March 2023, is a start-up that until now has been little known in the west. But its Kimi chatbot, based on a previous LLM, was already the third most used in China in November 2024, according to Counterpoint, a marketing research firm based in Hong Kong. Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent are reportedly among its investors.
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