Beijing-based Moonshot AI, a start-up valued at US$3.3 billion and backed by Chinese tech giants like Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, has presented another David-vs-Goliath story after creating an open-source model that “set new records across benchmarks that assess reasoning, coding and agent capabilities”.
The new reasoning model, Kimi K2 Thinking, was the most popular model for developers on Hugging Face as of Monday, while its release post on X had attracted 4.5 million views. The popularity of the model – a variant of the Kimi K2 model – had further grown after CNBC reported its training cost was merely US$4.6 million. Moonshot AI did not comment on the cost.
Even without factoring in its costs, the latest model has impressed the AI community. Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, commented on X that Kimi K2 Thinking was another case of an open-source model passing a closed-source model.
