| Kimi | |
|---|---|
 | |
Screenshot  Screenshot of an example of a Kimi K2 answer describingWikipedia | |
| Developer | Moonshot AI |
| Initial release | October 2023; 2 years ago (2023-10) |
| Stable release | Kimi K2 Thinking / November 6, 2025; 22 days ago (2025-11-06) Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 / September 5, 2025; 2 months 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 platform (API platform) |
Kimi is anartificial intelligence (AI)chatbot and series oflarge language models developed by Chinese companyMoonshot AI. Its first version, released in 2023, was known for supporting up to 128,000 tokens of context.[1] Kimi K2, an open-weight model released in July 2025, showed strong performances on coding benchmarks.[2][3]
Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023. In October 2023, the company officially released the Kimi chatbot and began closed-beta testing.[4]
On 16 November 2023, Kimi was released to the general public based on the Moonshot model. The first version of Kimi supported lossless context of 128,000 tokens,[1] making it the first AI model that was capable of accepting contexts of this size.[5]
In March 2024, Moonshot AI began closed beta testing of an updated version of Kimi with a 2 million character context window.[6]
In July 2024, Kimi's “context caching” feature entered public beta.[7]
On 11 October 2024, Kimi Explore Edition, featuring AI-powered autonomous search, went live globally;[8] monthly active users have since exceeded 36 million.[9][10]
In November 2024, Kimi began internal testing of an AI video generation model.[11]
On 20 January 2025, Kimi K1.5 was released. Moonshot AI claimed it matched the performance ofOpenAI o1 in mathematics, coding, and multimodal reasoning capabilities.[12]
In April 2025, Kimi-VL, an open source 16 billion parametermixture of experts (MoE) large language model with 3 billion active parameters, was released. In June, areasoning model named Kimi-VL-Thinking was also released.[13][14]
In June 2025, Kimi-Dev, a 72B parameter coding-focused model based onQwen2.5-72B, was released. It achievedstate of the art performance among open source models on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark.[15][16] Also in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi-Researcher, an autonomous AI research agent available through Kimi's website and app.[17][18]
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 modifiedMIT license. It achieved state of the art performance in coding benchmarks while still offering good performance in other benchmarks.[3][2] 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.[19][20]
In September 2025, Moonshot AI added anagentic AI feature to Kimi known as "OK Computer" (likely named after theRadioheadalbum of the same name). It is capable of creating multi-page websites and editable slides from simple user prompts and can process up to 1 million rows of input data at once, and output text, audio, images, and video.[21][22]
In October 2025, Moonshot AI released Kimi Linear, a 48 billion parameter MoE model with 3 billion active parameters. It uses a more efficientattention method known as Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), which reduces memory usage and improves generation speed at longer context window sizes.[23]
The Kimi apps are free to use with general rate limits. However, there are three subscription plans known as "Moderato", "Allegretto", and "Vivace" (all named aftertempo markings). The plans offer higher usage of the K2 model, access to K2 Turbo, a version of the model that runs on faster hardware, extended access to Kimi Researcher and OK Computer, and faster Kimi slides generation.[24]
