Moonshot AI, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup backed by Alibaba, has released a new open-source AI model called Kimi K2, signaling an aggressive move to regain its competitive edge in China’s rapidly evolving and intensely contested AI market.
This launch aligns with a growing trend among Chinese tech giants to embrace open-source strategies, aiming to showcase their technological prowess and counter U.S. restrictions on technology exports.
Kimi K2 is a formidable AI model, featuring enhanced coding capabilities and superior performance in general agent tasks and tool integration. Moonshot AI claims the model outperforms other mainstream open-source models, including DeepSeek’s V3, and can rival the capabilities of leading U.S. models, such as those from Anthropic, particularly in complex coding functions.
Technically, Kimi K2 is a 1 trillion parameter model built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, activating 32 billion parameters per query to balance capacity with practical performance. To accelerate adoption and undercut rivals, Moonshot AI is offering API access to Kimi K2 at a highly competitive price of $0.15 per million input tokens.
Moonshot AI, founded in 2023 by Tsinghua University graduate Yang Zhilin, quickly rose to prominence in 2024 with its Kimi application, which excelled in long-text analysis and AI search functions. At one point, Kimi ranked third in monthly active users in China.
However, the company’s market standing has since declined following the disruptive entry of DeepSeek’s low-cost models in early 2025, which saw Kimi’s user ranking drop to seventh place by June. The release of Kimi K2 is a direct response to this intensified domestic competition.
Also read:Â Viksit Workforce for a Viksit Bharat
Do Follow: The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News LinkedIn Account | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Facebook | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Youtube | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Twitter |The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Whatsapp Channel | The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News Instagram
About us:
The Mainstream formerly known as CIO News is a premier platform dedicated to delivering latest news, updates, and insights from the tech industry. With its strong foundation of intellectual property and thought leadership, the platform is well-positioned to stay ahead of the curve and lead conversations about how technology shapes our world. From its early days as CIO News to its rebranding as The Mainstream on November 28, 2024, it has been expanding its global reach, targeting key markets in the Middle East & Africa, ASEAN, the USA, and the UK. The Mainstream is a vision to put technology at the center of every conversation, inspiring professionals and organizations to embrace the future of tech.
