Moonshot AI
In plain wordsA Beijing artificial intelligence company, founded in 2023, that makes the Kimi chatbot and very large models that anyone can download.
The Beijing company behind the Kimi assistant and the Kimi language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code., counted in press coverage among the 'AI tigers', the handful of Chinese start-ups that rose to prominence as model developers after ChatGPT. Kimi launched in October 2023 with an unusually long context windowcontext window, n.: How much an AI model can read and keep in view at once: the instructions, the conversation so far and any attached documents. Text that does not fit has to be cut, summarized or left out. — about 200,000 Chinese characters, extended to two million in 2024 — which made reading long documents its early selling point. Kimi K1.5 (January 2025) was a reasoning modelreasoning model, n.: An AI model trained to work through a problem step by step in hidden 'thinking' text before it answers. Letting it think longer generally makes it better at math, coding and planning. trained with reinforcement learningreinforcement learning, n.: A way of teaching a computer program by trial and error: it tries actions, earns points for good results and penalties for bad ones, and gradually learns which choices pay off over time., and Kimi K2 (July 2025) was a mixture of expertsmixture of experts, n.: A way to build very large AI models cheaply: the model contains many specialist sub-networks, and for each word only a few are switched on, picked by a small dispatcher network. model with one trillion total and 32 billion active parameters, released as open weightsopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private. and noted for agentic tool usetool use, n.: An AI model's ability to reach beyond its own knowledge by operating outside tools — searching the web, running code, using a calculator or an app — and folding the results into its work. and for stable training with a variant of the MuonMuon, prop. n.: A newer training method for neural networks that tidies each update so it pushes evenly in all directions within a weight table. Several groups report that it trains language models with less computing than the standard method. optimizer. Successors include K2 Thinking (November 2025), K2.5 (January 2026) and K3 (July 2026). Alibaba and Tencent are among its investors.
Origin
Founded in March 2023 in Beijing by Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua University and Carnegie Mellon graduate who co-authored the Transformer-XL and XLNet papers, with fellow Tsinghua alumni Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. Its Chinese name, Yuezhi Anmian, means 'the dark side of the moon'.
Related
- DeepSeekDeepSeek, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company whose free, cheaply trained models startled the world in January 2025 by nearly matching the best American systems.
- Zhipu AIZhipu AI, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company that grew out of Tsinghua University and makes the GLM family of language models. Outside China it uses the name Z.ai.
- open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private.
- mixture of expertsmixture of experts, n.: A way to build very large AI models cheaply: the model contains many specialist sub-networks, and for each word only a few are switched on, picked by a small dispatcher network.
- context windowcontext window, n.: How much an AI model can read and keep in view at once: the instructions, the conversation so far and any attached documents. Text that does not fit has to be cut, summarized or left out.
- QwenQwen, prop. n.: A family of AI language models from the Chinese company Alibaba, many free to download, which by 2025 had become the most popular starting point for other people's open AI models.
Mentioned in
AlibabaAlibaba, prop. n.: A Chinese e-commerce and cloud-computing giant whose Qwen family of AI models, mostly free to download, is among the most widely used in the world., MiniMax (company)MiniMax (company), prop. n.: A Shanghai artificial intelligence company, founded in 2021, that makes AI companion apps, the Hailuo video generator and large language models, several released openly., Zhipu AIZhipu AI, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company that grew out of Tsinghua University and makes the GLM family of language models. Outside China it uses the name Z.ai.