Kimi

Kimi is the flagship AI assistant product built by Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup founded by Yang Zhilin . It began as a conversational assistant distinguished by its long-context window—expanding to 2 million characters of lossless context within its first six months, achieved through what Monolith Capital described as native re-engineering of the full model stack rather than technical shortcuts . The product line has since evolved rapidly: Kimi Exploration Edition launched in October 2024 with autonomous search and multi-step reasoning capabilities , followed by the visual reasoning model k1 in December 2024 , and the K2 series through 2025—K2 as an open-source MoE foundation model with stronger coding and agent capabilities , K2 Thinking as its most powerful open-source reasoning model to date , and K2.5 in January 2026 with advances across agent tasks, code, and visual understanding . As 暗涌Waves reported, Moonshot AI's investors viewed the company's consumer-facing super-app ambition as fundamentally a "departure to start anew" from its predecessor Recurrent AI's B2B focus .