Kimi

Kimi is the AI assistant product built by Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup founded by Yang Zhilin that spun out from Recurrent AI . The assistant is powered by a self-developed large language model with hundreds of billions of parameters, with the team doing native redesign from pre-training through alignment and inference rather than taking technical shortcuts . Kimi first drew attention for its long-context capabilities—supporting 2 million characters of lossless context as of early 2024 —and has since evolved through several model generations: the "Kimi Exploration Edition" launched in October 2024 with autonomous search and multi-step reasoning , the visual reasoning model k1 in December 2024 , and most recently the open-sourced Kimi K2 in mid-2025, a Mixture-of-Experts architecture model emphasizing coding and general agent tasks . Moonshot AI itself has been backed by Sequoia China, Alibaba, Gaorong Ventures, and other prominent investors .