Moonshot AI, the Alibaba-backed Chinese startup, has released Kimi K2, an open-source language model with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion activated parameters. This release signals China’s most significant attempt yet to close the gap between open-source and proprietary models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus. The model is available in two variants: Kimi-K2-Base for researchers and Kimi-K2-Instruct for general-purpose and agentic tasks. Built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, Kimi K2 supports 128K context length and is designed for complex multi-step reasoning and tool usage. Moonshot has priced access to the model competitively. The input token cost is $0.15 per million, and the output token cost is $2.50 per million, making it significantly cheaper than GPT-4.1 or Claude Opus. According to CNBC, analyst […]