In plain words
Kimi is two things with one name. It is a chatbot app, on the web and on phones, where you chat, upload long documents and ask for code. And it is the family of large language models inside that app, named Kimi K2, K3 and so on.
Both come from Moonshot AI, a company founded in Beijing in 2023. Kimi first became known in China for reading very long texts in one go, such as a whole report or book.
What makes Kimi stand out worldwide is that Moonshot publishes many of its biggest models with open weights. That means developers can download the trained model and run it on their own servers, instead of only using it through Moonshot's app. As of November 2026 the newest is Kimi K3.1 Pro, released on Moonshot's API in October.
Everyday example
A restaurant that also sells its recipe
Most famous restaurants keep their recipes secret: you can only eat the dish at their tables. Moonshot is like a restaurant that serves the dish and also publishes the full recipe. You can eat at the Kimi app, or take the recipe home and cook it in your own kitchen, if your kitchen is big enough.
Where the example breaks: A recipe lists every ingredient. Open weights give you the finished model, not the training data or every step used to make it, and running the biggest Kimi models needs a room of powerful computers, not a home kitchen.
How it actually works
Kimi's recent models share a few design choices that explain how they can be huge and still affordable to run.
Mixture of experts
Kimi K2 has about 1 trillion parameters, but only about 32 billion are used for each word. The model is split into many specialist parts and a router picks a few for each token. This design is called mixture of experts.
Long context
Kimi was built from the start to handle long inputs. Kimi K3, for example, accepts about a million tokens in its context window, roughly several books' worth of text at once.
Thinking and agents
Versions like K2 Thinking spend time on hidden working steps before answering, like a reasoning model. Later versions can split a big job across many sub-agents working in parallel, an approach Moonshot calls Agent Swarm. See multi-agent systems.
Open weights with a licence
The weights are posted for download on Hugging Face. They come with Moonshot's own licences; K3's, for example, requires large companies that host it as a paid service to sign a separate deal with Moonshot, so the models are open to download but not fully unrestricted.
- Maker
- Moonshot AI, founded in Beijing in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin and two fellow Tsinghua University graduates
- Chatbot launched
- October 2023, able to take in up to 200,000 Chinese characters per conversation
- Breakthrough model
- Kimi K2, July 2025: 1 trillion parameters, 32 billion active, open weights
- Investors
- Include China's Alibaba and Tencent
Kimi is one of several Chinese model families released with open weights, alongside DeepSeek and Qwen.
Questions people ask
Is Kimi the same as Moonshot AI?
No. Moonshot AI is the company; Kimi is its product name, used for both the chatbot app and its models. It is like the difference between OpenAI and ChatGPT.
Is Kimi open source?
Many Kimi models have open weights: anyone can download and run them under Moonshot's licence. The training data and full training code are not released, so most people call them open-weights models rather than fully open source.
Can Kimi run on my laptop?
Not the flagship models. They have trillions of parameters and need a cluster of data-centre GPUs. Most people use Kimi through its app or through cloud services that host the open weights.
Is Kimi a Chinese AI?
Yes. Moonshot AI is based in Beijing. As with any chatbot, check its privacy policy before sharing personal or work data, and note that hosted versions may follow the rules of the country where they run.
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