China's AI Upstart Moonshot Stuns Valley Again with a $4.6M Wonder
14 days ago
- #AI
- #Open-source
- #Moonshot AI
- Moonshot AI released Kimi K2 Thinking, an open-source reasoning model matching GPT-5 and Claude 4.5 Sonnet, trained for just $4.6 million.
- The model excels in benchmarks like Humanity’s Last Exam and BrowseComp, outperforming GPT-5 in some tests.
- Moonshot AI was founded by Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon alumnus with experience at Google Brain and Meta AI.
- Alibaba holds a 36% stake in Moonshot AI, valuing the startup at around $3.3 billion, and backs China's top AI labs.
- Moonshot AI differentiates from DeepSeek by focusing on agentic behavior and tool use, optimizing for action over deliberation.
- Kimi K2 Thinking's low-cost training challenges U.S. AI labs, signaling a potential efficiency gap favoring Chinese innovation.