The Chinese startup Monshot AI has presented Kimi K2, an open -source artificial intelligence model that arrives with outstanding programming capabilities and autonomous tasks that, according to The published benchmarksThey spray competition in several of their models. Its launch occurs at a key moment for the sector, when Chinese companies seek to replicate the disruptive success of Deepseek with potential height models and much cheaper than market alternatives.
Kimi does not come from nothing. MoNshot ai was one of the most promising startups in the Chinese ecosystem of AI and that giants like Alibaba have invested greatly. His Kimi chatbot reached third place in monthly active users in August 2024, but fell to the seventh in June After the emergence of Deepseek R1 in January. Now try to recover ground with a strategy that combines open source and aggressive prices, following the formula that catapulted Deepseek.
Image: MoNshot AI
What Kimi K2 offers. The model has 1 billion total parameters and 32,000 million activated parameters, using The well-known Mixture-Of-Experts architecture to optimize computational costs. It is presented in two versions: a base for researchers and developers, and another optimized for conversation and autonomous tasks. Kimi K2 thus becomes Moonshot AI’s proposal with the ability to act as an intelligent agent to use tools, write code, complete workflows or talk, among other tasks.
Kimi K2 explained in numbers. In performance testsKimi K2 has achieved 65.8% precision at Swe-Bench Verified, one of the most demanding benchmarks for software engineering. In LivecodeBench it reached 53.7%, exceeding 46.9% of Deepseek-V3 and 44.7% of GPT-4.1. In mathematics, its 97.4% score in Math-500 exceeds 92.4% of GPT-4.1, suggesting significant advances in mathematical reasoning.
The price factor. MoNshot is charging $ 0.15 per million input tokens and $ 2.50 per million tokens out of the developers who use their API. Compared, Claude Opus 4 It charges 100 times more for the entrance (15 dollars) and 30 times more for the output ($ 75), while GPT-4.1 charges 2 dollars per entrance and 8 per exit. In addition, the model is available for free in Web applications and Kimi mobile, without monthly subscriptions that require chatgpt or Claude for their most advanced models.
Technical innovation. MoNshot has developed the MuCanclip optimizer, which allows train models of one billion parameters “With zero training instability.” This technology could drastically reduce the training costs of large models, a problem that has limited the development of AI to companies with greater resources.
Double channel strategy. The company offers so much Free access to the source code as payment API at a very competitive price. This strategy allows companies to start with the API for immediate implementation and then migrate to self -healing versions either by regulatory cost or compliance. And it is that each developer who downloads Kimi K2 becomes a potential business client.
Moment of inflection. Kimi K2 represents a convergence point where open source models and proprietary alternatives shake hands. MoNshot AI intends to turn Kimi into a tool for everything, while offering its open source model and is reserved to charge for the use of its API for all types of implementations.
And now what. The launch reaches a critical point in which both Openai, such as Google or Anthropic, must respond to this wave of cheap and high quality language models. The issue is no longer whether open source models can match the owners, but if large technological ones can adapt their business models fast enough to compete in this new scenario. The looks are put in GPT-5 And in the next movements of the industry at a rate, as always, accelerated.
Cover image | Xataka with Mockuuuups Studio and Kimi AI
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