China's AI "Kimmy K2" Draws Intense Attention, Hailed as a "DeepSeek Moment"

Ranked First in Creative Writing Among AI Models
Catching Up with Some DeepSeek Models
Moonshot AI Chatbot Becomes China's Third Most Used

China's latest artificial intelligence (AI) model, "Kimmy (KIMI) K2," is generating shockwaves for its performance, with some observers saying it rivals DeepSeek, which was released earlier this year.

Kimmy K2 released by Moonshot AI.

According to China's state-run Xinhua News Agency on the 19th, the international academic journal Nature praised the outstanding performance of Kimmy K2, unveiled by Beijing-based AI company Moonshot AI, describing it as "another DeepSeek moment."

Previously, on the 11th, Moonshot AI introduced Kimmy K2, claiming that its performance is equal to or surpasses that of some Western competitors and certain DeepSeek models.

Nature reported that Kimmy K2 received particularly high marks in coding during performance evaluations. In the "Creative Writing vs. Benchmark" category, which assesses the creativity and authenticity of writing, it ranked first among AI models.

According to official data, Kimmy K2 has 1 trillion parameters, but utilizes a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture that activates only 32 billion parameters at a time.

AI model released by Moonshot AI. Moonshot AI homepage

Like DeepSeek, Kimmy K2 is an open-weight model that anyone can freely download, modify, and distribute. Nature explained that the release of another high-performance AI model in China just six months after DeepSeek demonstrates the ongoing momentum of AI innovation in the country.

Mario Krenn, who leads AI research at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, told Nature, "It would not be surprising if something else comes out of China in just a few months."

Moonshot AI, founded in March 2023, drew attention by launching the first model in China capable of processing inputs of over 200,000 characters. According to market research firm Counterpoint, as of November last year, the initial Kimmy model was the third most widely used chatbot in China.

Moonshot AI's Chinese company name is the rather unique "Beijing Dark Side of the Moon Technology Co., Ltd." (北京月之暗面科技有限公司). It is said that founder Yang Zhilin named the company in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his favorite British rock band Pink Floyd's legendary album "The Dark Side of the Moon."

Yang Zhilin, born in 1992 in Guangdong Province in southern China, ranked first in Guangdong in the National Youth Informatics Olympiad during high school and graduated at the top of his class from Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Engineering. He is known as a genius scientist who earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

He has worked at Facebook AI Research and Google Brain, Google's deep learning AI research team, and is currently an assistant professor at Tsinghua University. Some predict that he could become the wealthiest member of the "Jiulinghou" (90s generation), referring to those born after the 1990s.