Definition
Plain language
A Chinese open-weight language model from Moonshot AI.
As stated in the literature
Moonshot AI's open-weight foundation model series, including Kimi-K2-Thinking and Kimi-CLI variants.
Also called: Kimi-K2-Thinking, Kimi-CLI, 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
“And the agents doing all this are frontier systems — Codex, Claude Code, a Kimi model — top-of-the-line.”Episode 159 — Can a Coding Agent Run Its Own Robot Experiments Overnight, With No Human Resetting the Scene?