China's latest artificial intelligence (AI) model "Kimi (KIMI) K2" is gaining global attention for its performance, following the surprise announcement of DeepSeek earlier this year.
On the 20th, according to industry sources, the international journal Nature noted that the performance of Kimi K2, developed by the Beijing-based AI startup "Moonshot AI," is outstanding and described this release as "another DeepSeek moment." Previously, Moonshot AI introduced Kimi K2 on the 11th, stating that its performance is on par with or exceeds that of some models from Western competitors and DeepSeek.
Nature reported that Kimi K2 received especially high scores in coding evaluations. In the "Creative Writing vs Benchmark" category, which assesses originality and authenticity in writing, it ranked first among AI models.
According to Moonshot AI, Kimi K2 has a total of 1 trillion parameters but activates only about 32 billion at a time based on a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture. Similar to DeepSeek, Kimi K2 is also notable for being an open-weight model that anyone can freely download, modify, and distribute.
Nature assessed that the emergence of another high-performance AI model in China just six months after the release of DeepSeek demonstrates that China's AI innovation is not merely a temporary accomplishment but is on a trajectory of sustained development.
Founded in March 2023, Moonshot AI is relatively lesser-known globally, but according to market research firm Counterpoint, the initial model of Kimi was the third most widely used chatbot in China as of November last year. Local media reported that Moonshot AI gained attention by launching the first model in China capable of processing over 200,000 characters as input.
The founder of Moonshot AI, Yang Zilin, born in 1992, hails from Guangdong Province in southern China. He ranked first in the national youth informatics Olympiad during high school, earning an opportunity to enroll in Tsinghua University, where he graduated at the top of his class in computer science. He obtained a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and has gained experience at global AI research organizations including Facebook AI Research and Google Brain. He currently serves as an assistant professor at Tsinghua University.