Moonshot is the latest Chinese start-up to launch a new open-source AI model onto the market in the shape of Kimi 2, after DeepSeek shook the market back in January.
Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI hopes to take on Deepseek and other local Chinese rivals – as well as it’s US counterparts – with its new open-source large language model, Kimi 2. The launch coincides with OpenAI’s Sam Altman announcing this weekend that its first open-source model would be delayed indefinitely for safety reasons.
Moonshot says that in testing it beat ChatGPT and Anthopic’s Claude in coding, and at a lower cost. Kimi-K2-Base is the foundation model, “for researchers and builders who want full control for fine-tuning and custom solutions”, while Kimi-K2-Instruct is the “post-trained model best for drop-in, general-purpose chat and agentic experiences”, according to Moonshot AI.
Moonshot AI says the model outperforms mainstream open-source models in certain areas, including DeepSeek’s V3 and Anthropic’s Claude in areas like coding.
While Meta Platforms has released an open source model, the majority of US players keep their large AI models proprietary, so many see the open source model being practiced by Chinese companies as a way to engage more deeply with the developer community, and compete with their US rivals.
Tsinghua University graduate Yang Zhilin founded Moonshot in 2023 and it has influential backers including Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. It had strong initial success with Kimi, thanks in part to its AI search functions and long text analysis, but Deepseek’s release in January saw it lose ground.
Now, it’s hoping to grab the limelight again with the latest release, which outperforms ChatGPT and Claude in certain functions on the industry benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified. The real winner for Kimi 2 will likely be its so called ‘agentic’ abilities – the ability to accomplish multi-task goals with limited human intervention. Kimi 2 makes Moonshot AI the latest player to seriously up the competition among Chinese and US AI models.
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