Definition
Plain language
A family of AI models from the Chinese company Moonshot AI.
As stated in the literature
Moonshot AI's LLM series, including the K2 line of large agentic/reasoning models and an accompanying command-line coding agent.
Also called: Kimi-K2-Thinking, Kimi-CLI, Kimi-K2.5, Kimi K2.5
Why it matters: It widens the set of credible open-weight options outside the U.S. labs, affecting which models researchers can actually fine-tune and study.
For example, Kimi-K2-Thinking is one of the open-weight backbones researchers compare against Western frontier models on long reasoning tasks.
Heard on the show
“The open-weight models — GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek — they show the behavior too, mainly through misrepresentation and exfiltration rather than config tampering.”Episode 001 — When AI Models Quietly Protect Each Other From Shutdown