The launch of the Kimi K2 artificial intelligence model by Alibaba Group Holding-backed Moonshot AI has drawn rapid uptake amid praise from industry experts.
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Downloads of Kimi K2, launched on July 11, doubled to 145,000 on Monday from 76,000 on Friday, according to AI and machine-learning developer platform Hugging Face.
The large language model (LLM) from the Beijing-based start-up uses a mixture-of-experts (MOE) architecture and boasts 1 trillion total parameters, with 32 billion activated per inference. For comparison, DeepSeek-V3 has 671 billion parameters.
“While companies like OpenAI invest hundreds of millions in compute resources, Moonshot’s Kimi K2 shows a more cost-efficient approach to training and inference – highlighting a possible turning point in AI development strategy,” said Henning Steier, Bluespace Ventures’ chief marketing officer, in a LinkedIn post.
The model is free via Kimi’s app and browser interface, unlike OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude, which charge monthly subscriptions.
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MOE is a machine-learning approach that divides an AI model into separate sub-networks, or experts – each focused on a subset of the input data – to jointly perform a task. This is said to greatly reduce computation costs during training and achieve faster performance during inference.
Moonshot said it developed Kimi K2 at a fraction of the cost typically spent by larger AI firms.
