Kimi (chatbot)

Last updated
Kimi
Developer(s) Moonshot AI
Initial releaseOctober 2023;1 year ago (2023-10)
Stable release
Kimi-K2-0905-Instruct / September 5, 2025;14 days ago (2025-09-05)
Platform
Type Chatbot
Large language model
License Proprietary
MIT License (Kimi-VL, Kimi-Dev)
Modified MIT License (Kimi K2)
Website kimi.com
kimi.moonshot.cn (China)

Kimi is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot and series of large language models developed by Moonshot AI. Its first version, released in 2023, was known for its ability to handle 200,000 Chinese characters in a single prompt. [1] In July 2025, Kimi K2 was released which performed well on several popular benchmarks and also became the top-rated open source AI model on LMArena. [2] [3] [4] In September 2025, an updated version of K2, Kimi-K2-0905-Instruct, was released. [5] [6]

Contents

History

Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023. In October 2023, the company officially released the Kimi chatbot and began closed-beta testing. [7]

On 16 November 2023, Kimi was released to the general public in China based on the Moonshot model. The first version of Kimi supported lossless context input of roughly 200,000 Chinese characters [1] , making it the first AI model that was capable of accepting inputs of this size. [8]

In March 2024, Moonshot AI began closed beta testing of an updated version of Kimi with a 2 million character context window. [9]

In July 2024, Kimi's “context caching” feature entered public beta. [10]

On 11 October 2024, Kimi Explore Edition, featuring AI-powered autonomous search, went live in China [11] ; monthly active users have since exceeded 36 million. [12] [13]

In November 2024, Kimi began internal testing of an AI video generation model. [14]

On 20 January 2025, Kimi K1.5 was released. Moonshot AI claimed it matched the performance of OpenAI o1 in mathematics, coding, and multimodal reasoning capabilities. [15]

In April 2025, Kimi-VL, an open source 16 billion parameter mixture of experts (MoE) large language model with 3 billion active parameters, was released. In June, a version of the model capable of reasoning was also released. [16] [17]

In June 2025, Kimi-Dev, a 72B parameter coding-focued model based on Qwen2.5-72B, was released. It achieved state of the art performance among open source models on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark. [18] [19] Also in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi-Researcher, an autonomous AI research agent available through Kimi's website and app. [20] [21]

In July 2025, Moonshot AI released Kimi K2, a 1 trillion parameter mixture of experts large language model with 32 billion active parameters which was open sourced under a modified MIT license. It achieved state of the art performance in coding benchmarks while still offering good performance in other benchmarks. [3] [4] On 9 September 2025, Moonshot AI released an updated version of K2, Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905, which improved its performance in coding tasks and increased its context window from 128K tokens to 256K tokens. [5] [6]

Pricing

The Kimi chatbot and apps are free to use outside of China. However, there is a $19 USD per month subscription plan for the Kimi Researcher feature (known as "STARTER"), which gives access to 20 uses per month, high-priority access, the ability to have 2 research tasks run at the same time, and opportunities to test advanced models. In China, Kimi has six tiers of plans ranging from 5.2 yuan for four days to 399 yuan for a year of priority use. [22]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Xu Ziming. "Domestic large models "roll out": Kimi's ultra-long context goes viral; Wondershare "Tianmu" focuses on audio & video". caijing.chinadaily.com.cn. Archived from the original on 2025-01-20. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  2. ↑ "Chinese open-source AI models occupy top spots among global developers: ranking". South China Morning Post. 2025-07-21. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  3. 1 2 "Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence". moonshotai.github.io. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  4. 1 2 Cheng, Evelyn (2025-07-14). "Alibaba-backed Moonshot releases new Kimi AI model that beats ChatGPT, Claude in coding — and it costs less". CNBC. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  5. 1 2 "moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 · Hugging Face". huggingface.co. 2025-09-05. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  6. 1 2 "Moonshot AI's updated Kimi model offers expanded context window, improved coding". South China Morning Post. 2025-09-04. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  7. ↑ "Moonshot AI's large-model service "Kimi Chat" starts closed beta, in deep co-operation with Volcengine". company.cnstock.com. Archived from the original on 2023-10-17. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  8. ↑ Cao Jing. "Supporting 200 000-character input, Moonshot AI opens the "long-text" era for hundred-billion-parameter models". cn.chinadaily.com.cn. Archived from the original on 2025-01-21. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  9. ↑ "Moonshot's Kimi intelligent assistant supporting 2-million-character context starts internal testing". news.cnstock.com. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  10. ↑ Tencent (2024-07-01). "Moonshot Kimi open platform launches public beta of "context caching"". news.qq.com (in Chinese (China)). Archived from the original on 2025-01-20. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  11. ↑ Tencent (2024-10-12). "One search can deeply read 500+ pages: Kimi Explore Edition arrives—will AI out-search humans?". news.qq.com (in Chinese (China)). Archived from the original on 2025-01-20. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  12. ↑ "AI weekly: Yang Zhilin says Kimi MAU exceeds 36 million; Robin Li: large-model hallucination basically eliminated". www.yicai.com. Archived from the original on 2025-01-20. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  13. ↑ "AI assistant Kimi signs with Chengdu Island of Scientific Innovation". www.cdrb.com.cn. Archived from the original on 2025-01-20. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  14. ↑ Guancha (2024-11-28). "Kimi testing AI video generation? Moonshot: currently in grey-box testing". t.cj.sina.cn. Archived from the original on 2025-01-20. Retrieved 2024-12-29.
  15. ↑ "Chinese AI Firms Debut New LLMs to Rival OpenAI's Powerful O1 in Math and Coding". www.yicaiglobal.com. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  16. ↑ MoonshotAI/Kimi-VL, Moonshot AI, 2025-09-09, retrieved 2025-09-09
  17. ↑ Kemper, Jonathan (2025-04-27). "Moonshot AI's open-source Kimi-VL tackles text, images and video with just 2.8 billion parameters". THE DECODER. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  18. ↑ MoonshotAI/Kimi-Dev, Moonshot AI, 2025-09-08, retrieved 2025-09-09
  19. ↑ "China's AI sprint: MiniMax, Moonshot lock horns in multimodal model race". DIGITIMES. 2025-06-24. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  20. ↑ "Kimi-Researcher: End-to-End RL Training for Emerging Agentic Capabilities". moonshotai.github.io. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  21. ↑ "Kimi from Moonshot Dark Side Launches Kimi-Researcher Deep Research Agent and Starts Internal Testing". AIbase. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
  22. ↑ "Moonshot AI's Kimi Chatbot offers paid service in bid to profit from mass users". South China Morning Post. 2024-05-20. Retrieved 2025-09-09.
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