Overview
Moonshot AI is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in March 2023, known for its Kimi chatbot and series of open-source large language models with industry-leading long-context capabilities. The company was founded by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin, schoolmates from Tsinghua University. Yang, a former AI researcher at Google and Meta, aims to build foundation models toward AGI with three milestones: long context length, multimodal world models, and scalable general architectures capable of continuous self-improvement.
The company is one of China's "AI Tiger" startups, having raised over $1 billion in funding with a valuation of approximately $4.3 billion. Moonshot released the first version of Kimi in October 2023, notable for processing up to 200,000 Chinese characters per conversation.
Text Models
| Model | Parameters | Active | Context | Description |
|---|
| Kimi K2.5 | 1T | 32B | 256K | Native multimodal (text, image, video), Agent Swarm orchestration |
| Kimi K2 Thinking | 1T | 32B | 256K | Advanced reasoning with 200-300 tool calls |
| Kimi K2 | 1T | 32B | 128K | Open-weight agentic model, trained on 15.5T tokens |
| Kimi K1.5 | - | - | - | Multimodal reasoning, matches OpenAI o1 |
| Kimi Linear | 48B | 3B | 1M | Efficient architecture with Kimi Delta Attention |
Vision-Language Models
| Model | Parameters | Active | Context | Description |
|---|
| Kimi-VL | 16B MoE | 3B | 128K | Multimodal understanding with MoonViT encoder |
| Kimi-VL-Thinking | 16B MoE | 2.8B | 128K | Long-chain reasoning variant |
Coding Models
| Model | Description |
|---|
| Kimi-Dev | 72B coding model based on Qwen2.5-72B, SWE-bench SOTA |
| Kimi Code | Open-source terminal coding tool (rivals Claude Code) |
Research Tools
| Tool | Description |
|---|
| Kimi-Researcher | Autonomous AI research agent |
Consumer Products
- Kimi: AI chatbot available via kimi.com and mobile apps
- Subscription tiers: Moderato, Allegretto, Vivace (named after tempo markings)
Open Source
Moonshot releases models under a modified MIT license on Hugging Face:
- Kimi K2.5 (moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5)
- Kimi K2, K2 Thinking, K2 Instruct
- Kimi-VL, Kimi-VL-Thinking
- Kimi Linear (moonshotai/Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct)
- Kimi-Dev
Links