This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by ANIRUDDHA ADAK
China’s Moonshot AI has dropped a bombshell: Kimi K2, a brand-new, open-source, agentic giant that is already outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 on core coding tasks—and it costs 90 % less to run. Here’s everything you need to know about the release that’s sending shockwaves through the AI world.
What’s New in Kimi K2?
| Feature | Kimi K2 | GPT-4.1 | Claude Opus 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parameters | 1 T total / 32 B active (MoE) | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Coding SWE-Bench | 65.8 % | 54.6 % | 67 % |
| LiveCodeBench | 53.7 % | Lower | Lower |
| Input Cost | $0.15 / 1 M tokens | $2 | $15 |
| Output Cost | $2.50 / 1 M tokens | $8 | $75 |
| License | Permissive open-source | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Chat & API Access | 100 % free subscription-free | Paid tiers | Paid tiers |
“Kimi K2 is the first model I feel comfortable using in production since Claude 3.5 Sonnet.” — Pietro Schirano, founder of MagicPath
Two Flavors, Zero Gatekeepers
Moonshot ships two ready-to-use variants on GitHub and Hugging Face:
- Kimi-K2-Base – Raw 1-T checkpoint for researchers who want total control.
- Kimi-K2-Instruct – Post-trained, chat-ready “drop-in” model that can write, test, and deploy full-stack code out of the box.
Both are Apache-style licensed; the only ask is that you display “Kimi K2” in the UI if your product exceeds 100 M monthly users or $20 M monthly revenue.
Benchmark Highlights
- Agentic coding: 65.8 % on SWE-Bench Verified—neck-and-neck with Claude Sonnet 4, and 11 pts above GPT-4.1.
- Live coding: 53.7 % on LiveCodeBench, beating DeepSeek V3 and GPT-4.1.
- Math & science: Tops AIME, GPQA-Diamond, MATH-500.
- Multilingual: Competitive on MMLU-Pro across 20+ languages.
Wallet-Friendly Pricing
| Tokens | Kimi K2 | Claude Opus 4 | GPT-4.1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 M input | $0.15 | $15 | $2 |
| 1 M output | $2.50 | $75 | $8 |
That’s 100× cheaper on input and 30× cheaper on output versus Claude.
Try It Right Now
- Web chat: chat.kimi.com – no sign-up wall.
- API: platform.moonshot.ai – pay-as-you-go.
- GitHub: Full weights & code at MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2.
- Hugging Face: One-click download & inference via the official model card.
Why This Matters
While OpenAI has indefinitely delayed its first open-source model citing safety, China’s Moonshot just shipped a frontier-grade, 1-trillion-parameter model to the world—for free. Developers on X are already spinning up:
- Autonomous code bases
- Interactive data-viz dashboards
- End-to-end web apps
“It’s your Linux terminal with a brain.” — Medium review
The Takeaway
Kimi K2 isn’t just an upgrade; it’s a tipping point for open, agentic AI. If you’re building software, doing research, or simply curious, there’s no excuse not to test-drive it today.
Ready to meet the new king of open-source AI?
Clone it, chat it, ship it—all before your coffee gets cold.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by ANIRUDDHA ADAK