Moonshot AI

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Moonshot AI
北京月之暗面科技有限公司
Moonshot AI logo
File:Moonshot AI Headquarters.jpg
Moonshot AI headquarters in Beijing
Type Private company
Industry Artificial intelligence
Founded March 2023
Founders Yang Zhilin (CEO)
Zhou Xinyu
Wu Yuxin
Headquarters 13th Floor, Building 1, JD Technology Building
No. 76 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing, China
Key people Yang Zhilin (CEO)
Zhou Xinyu (Co-founder)
Wu Yuxin (Co-founder)
Zhang Yutao (Product Development)


Products Kimi AI assistant
Kimi K2 model
Kimi K1.5 model
Mooncake platform
Kimi Slides
Moonlight models
Ohai (social AI app)
Noisee (audio generation tool)



Valuation $3.3 billion (August 2024)
Employees ~300 (2025)
Website moonshot.cn

Moonshot AI (Chinese: 月之暗面; pinyin: Yuè Zhī Ànmiàn, literally "Dark Side of the Moon"; legal name: Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese artificial intelligence company headquartered in Beijing, founded in March 2023. The company specializes in developing large language models (LLMs) and aims to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) through foundational models with capabilities in long context processing, multimodal world modeling, and scalable architectures for self-improvement.[1] Moonshot AI has been dubbed one of China's "AI Tigers" or as part of the "Six Tigers" by investors, alongside companies like Zhipu AI, MiniMax, 01.AI, Baichuan AI, and DeepSeek.[2] The company is best known for its Kimi chatbot and the open-source Kimi K2 model, which features advanced long-context processing capabilities.

History

Foundation

Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin, all alumni of Tsinghua University, amid a surge in interest in generative AI following the success of ChatGPT.[3] The company was launched on the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon, which was founder Yang Zhilin's favorite album and the inspiration for the company's Chinese name.[1] The English name "Moonshot" reflects the ambitious and difficult nature of the company's mission, described by Yang as "like landing on the moon."[4]

Yang Zhilin stated that his goal for founding Moonshot AI was to build foundational models to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), with three key milestones: long context length, multimodal world model, and a scalable general architecture capable of continuous self-improvement without human input.[1]

Early Development (2023-2024)

In October 2023, Moonshot launched its first product, the Kimi chatbot, to the public. The chatbot initially could process up to 200,000 Chinese characters per conversation, making it the world's first AI assistant with such extensive context-handling capabilities.[3]

By March 2024, Moonshot claimed Kimi could handle 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, a significant upgrade from the previous version.[5] The chatbot emerged as the closest rival to Baidu's Ernie Bot in the Chinese market. Due to increased user demand following this upgrade, Kimi suffered a two-day outage on March 21, 2024, prompting a public apology from the company.[1]

Recent Developments (2025)

On January 20, 2025, Kimi K1.5 was released, which Moonshot claimed matched the performance of OpenAI's o1 model in mathematics, coding, and multimodal reasoning capabilities.[6]

In July 2025, Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K2, a large language model with 1 trillion total parameters using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, trained on 15.5 trillion tokens and released under a modified MIT License.[7]

On September 9, 2025, Moonshot AI released Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905, which increased performance in agentic coding tasks and doubled the context window to 256K tokens.[8]

Founders

Yang Zhilin

Yang Zhilin (杨植麟) serves as CEO and co-founder. He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and graduated from Tsinghua University, where he ranked first in his class at the Computer Science Department.[3] Before founding Moonshot AI, Yang worked at Facebook AI Research (now Meta AI) and Google Brain, where he co-authored influential papers including Transformer-XL and XLNet.[3] He also worked with Huawei Technologies on an early version of the Pangu AI model in 2020 and led a team to develop the Wudao LLM at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence in 2021.[3]

Zhou Xinyu

Zhou Xinyu (周昕宇) is a co-founder who previously worked at Hulu, Tencent, and Megvii, conducting research in deploying deep neural networks on hardware with limited computational resources.[9]

Wu Yuxin

Wu Yuxin (吴育昕) is a co-founder who previously worked at Google Brain on foundation models and at Meta AI Research on computer vision.[9]

Products and Services

Kimi Chatbot

File:Kimi chatbot interface.jpg
Kimi chatbot interface showing long-context capabilities

In October 2023, Moonshot launched its first AI chatbot, Kimi, whose name comes from Yang's English nickname.[1] The chatbot initially could process up to 200,000 Chinese characters per conversation, making it the world's first AI assistant with such extensive context-handling capabilities.[3]

By March 2024, Moonshot claimed Kimi could handle 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, a significant upgrade from the previous version.[1] This allows the chatbot to analyze and summarize the content of lengthy documents, such as academic papers, financial reports, or entire books, in a single query. For comparison, 2 million Chinese characters is roughly equivalent to the text of several novels.[5]

Pricing

In China, Kimi offers six tiers of subscription plans ranging from 5.2 yuan for four days to 399 yuan for a year of priority access.[10]

Kimi K2 Model

In July 2025, Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K2, a large language model with 1 trillion total parameters using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, where 32 billion parameters are active during inference.[11] The model was trained on 15.5 trillion tokens of data and is released under a modified MIT License.[1]

Key features of Kimi K2 include:

Feature Specification
Total Parameters 1 trillion
Active Parameters 32 billion
Architecture Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with 384 experts
Training Data 15.5 trillion tokens
Context Window 128K tokens (256K in K2-Instruct-0905)
License Modified MIT License

The model achieved state-of-the-art performance among open-source non-thinking models, with notable scores including:[12]

Model Development Timeline

Model ! Release Date ! Key Features ! Parameters
Kimi (initial) | October 2023 | 200,000 Chinese characters context | N/A
Kimi (upgraded) | March 2024 | 2 million Chinese characters context | N/A
Kimi K1.5 | January 20, 2025 | Matches OpenAI o1 in math, coding, multimodal; 128K context | N/A
Kimi K2 | July 2025 | MoE architecture, agentic coding, open-source (modified MIT) | 1 trillion (32 billion active)
Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 | September 9, 2025 | Improved coding, 256K context | 1 trillion
Kimi-VL | 2025 | Multimodal capabilities | N/A
Kimi-Dev-72B | 2025 | Development-focused model | 72 billion

Mooncake Platform

File:Mooncake architecture.png
Mooncake's KVCache-centric architecture diagram

Mooncake is the serving platform for Moonshot's Kimi chatbot, processing over 100 billion tokens daily.[1] It features a KVCache-centric disaggregated architecture that separates prefill and decoding clusters, utilizing underused CPU, DRAM, SSD, and NIC resources of GPU clusters.[13]

Moonshot was awarded the Erik Riedel Best Paper Award at the USENIX FAST conference in February 2025 for the paper detailing Mooncake's architecture.[14] In practical deployments, Mooncake enabled Kimi to handle 115% and 107% more requests on NVIDIA A800 and H800 clusters, respectively, compared to previous systems.[13]

Key components of Mooncake include:

  • Transfer Engine: Facilitates rapid data transfer across TCP, RDMA, and NVMe over Fabric protocols
  • P2P Store: Enables sharing of temporary objects between nodes in a cluster
  • KVCache-centric scheduler: Maximizes throughput while meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

The platform's code has been partially open-sourced on GitHub.[15]

Kimi Slides

In 2025, Moonshot AI launched Kimi Slides, an AI agent within the Kimi ecosystem that generates professional presentations from text prompts, documents, or website URLs.[16] The tool is part of Kimi+, Moonshot AI's premium version of the chatbot, though it was initially offered for free to all users.[16]

OK Computer Agent Mode

In late 2025, Moonshot AI introduced "OK Computer," an agent mode for Kimi that can create multi-page websites and editable slides from simple prompts. The feature supports processing up to 1 million rows of input data and multimedia outputs including text, audio, and video.[17] The name "OK Computer" is a reference to the 1997 album by Radiohead.[18]

Developer Platform

Moonshot AI provides an open platform for developers via its API service at platform.moonshot.ai. This includes access to models like Kimi K1.5, which features a 128K context window, function calling, and vision support. Pricing starts at $0.004 per 1K input tokens and $0.006 per 1K output tokens, with a free tier of 1 million tokens monthly.[19]

Funding and Valuation

Moonshot AI has raised significant capital since its inception, establishing it as one of the most valuable AI startups in China.

Funding History

Notable Funding Rounds
Date ! Round ! Amount Raised ! Lead Investors ! Post-Money Valuation ! Ref
Seed | $60 million | N/A | $300 million | [1]
Series A | > $300 million | HongShan (formerly Sequoia Capital China), Zhen Fund | Not specified | [20]
Series B | $1 billion | Alibaba Group, HongShan, Monolith Management, Xiaomi, Tom Preston-Werner | $2.5 billion | [21][22]
Series B Extension | $300 million | Tencent, Gaorong Capital | $3.3 billion | [23]

The company has raised approximately $1.36 billion in total funding by late 2024.[24] The February 2024 round was the largest single funding round for Chinese LLM developers on public record at the time.[21]

Research and Technical Contributions

Muon Optimizer

In collaboration with UCLA, Moonshot AI researchers published "Muon is Scalable for LLM Training," demonstrating successful scaling of the Muon optimizer.[25] The Muon optimizer, which uses momentum orthogonalized by Newton-Schulz iterations, achieves approximately 2× computational efficiency compared to AdamW under compute-optimal conditions.[26]

Key innovations include:

  • MuonClip: An enhanced variant that prevents training instability at massive scale
  • Weight decay integration: Crucial for scalability to larger models
  • Per-parameter update scale adjustments: Enhanced training stability

Moonlight Models

Based on the Muon optimizer research, Moonshot AI released Moonlight, a series of MoE models in 3B and 16B parameter configurations, trained with 5.7 trillion tokens.[27] The models demonstrated superior performance compared to similar-scale models while requiring significantly fewer training FLOPs.[26]

Corporate Structure

Headquarters

Moonshot AI is headquartered at:

The company also maintains an office in Shanghai.[29]

Employee Count

As of 2025, Moonshot AI employs approximately 300 people, having grown from just 40 employees at the time of its initial funding in October 2023 and approximately 80 employees in February 2024.[29][30]

Notable Events

Exam Period Restrictions

During China's June 2025 gaokao period, Moonshot AI, along with several major tech platforms including Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent, temporarily restricted certain AI features to mitigate exam-related misuse and prevent cheating.[31]

International Expansion Plans

In June 2024, reports suggested Moonshot AI was planning to expand into the US market with products like Ohai (a social AI app) and Noisee (an audio generation tool), but the company denied these intentions, stating no overseas products were in development.[32]

Controversies and Legal Issues

Funding Controversies

Following the February 2024 funding round, reports emerged that CEO Yang Zhilin and related individuals cashed out $40 million in shares, an unusually large amount for a first-year startup, raising concerns among investors.[33]

Investor Disputes

In November 2024, a group of investors filed for arbitration against the company's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, alleging that funding rounds were conducted without obtaining required consent from some AI-focused investors.[1] The dispute involved GSR Ventures China and four other firms that had invested in Yang Zhilin's previous venture, Recurrent AI.[34]

This led to reduced involvement from some investors and ongoing legal proceedings into 2025. Additional disputes involved alleged conflicts of interest related to a spin-off company and fiduciary breaches, further complicating investor relations.[35] As of February 2025, the arbitration case advanced without settlement.[36]

Competition and Market Position

Moonshot AI is considered one of China's "Four AI Tigers" or "Six Tigers" alongside:

The company competes with both domestic and international AI companies including:

Corporate Philosophy

Yang Zhilin has described his vision for Moonshot AI as combining "the technology idealism of OpenAI and business philosophy of ByteDance."[3] This philosophy aims to balance AGI's far-reaching potential with the need for practical, user-centered solutions that can sustain a commercially viable enterprise.[9]

The company's mission is inherently global in scope. Yang has stated: "We don't want to be anything Chinese, nor necessarily OpenAI," arguing that a truly impactful AGI company cannot endure long-term if confined to a regional market.[9]

Open Source Contributions

Moonshot AI has made several significant open-source contributions to the AI community:

  • Kimi K2 Model: Released under modified MIT License with full weights available on Hugging Face[38]
  • Mooncake Platform: Transfer Engine and technical report open-sourced[15]
  • Moonlight Models: Pretrained and instruction-tuned checkpoints released[27]
  • Muon Optimizer: Implementation and research findings made public[25]

See Also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 Moonshot AI, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshot_AI
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Meet the 'Six Tigers' that dominate China's AI industry, Quartz, March 10, 2025, https://qz.com/china-six-tigers-ai-startup-zhipu-moonshot-minimax-01ai-1851768509
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Meet Yang Zhilin: Moonshot AI founder builds business in the mould of ByteDance, OpenAI, South China Morning Post, August 7, 2024, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-yang-zhilin-moonshot-ai-093000045.html
  4. ↑ Moonshot AI's Founder: His Pursuit of AGI and the Company's Potential Viable Business Model, AI Proem, August 7, 2025, https://aiproem.substack.com/p/moonshot-ais-founder-his-pursuit
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI's Kimi chatbot can now process 2 million Chinese characters, Reuters, March 18, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-ai-startup-moonshot-ai-launches-new-chatbot-service-2024-03-18/
  6. ↑ Chinese AI Firms Debut New LLMs to Rival OpenAI's Powerful O1 in Math and Coding, Yicai Global, January 22, 2025, https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/chinese-ai-firms-debut-new-llms-to-rival-openais-powerful-o1-in-math-and-coding
  7. ↑ Alibaba-backed Moonshot releases new Kimi AI model that beats ChatGPT, Claude in coding - and it costs less, CNBC, July 14, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/alibaba-backed-moonshot-releases-kimi-k2-ai-rivaling-chatgpt-claude.html
  8. ↑ Moonshot AI's updated Kimi model offers expanded context window, improved coding, South China Morning Post, September 4, 2025, https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3324350/moonshot-ais-updated-kimi-model-offers-expanded-context-window-improved-coding
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Moonshot AI: Betting Big on Long-Context, Confronting the Challenges of Scale and Reliability, Center for Data Innovation, January 13, 2025, https://datainnovation.org/2025/01/moonshot-ai-betting-big-on-long-context-confronting-the-challenges-of-scale-and-reliability/
  10. ↑ Moonshot AI's Kimi Chatbot offers paid service in bid to profit from mass users, South China Morning Post, May 20, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3263374/moonshot-ais-kimi-chatbot-chinas-answer-chatgpt-offers-premium-service-mass-users
  11. ↑ Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence, arXiv, July 28, 2025, https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20534
  12. ↑ Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence, GitHub, https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Mooncake: Trading More Storage for Less Computation - A KVCache-centric Architecture for Serving LLM Chatbot, USENIX FAST 25, February 2025, https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast25/presentation/qin
  14. ↑ Chinese team wins award for AI booster that may help counter US chip ban, South China Morning Post, March 14, 2025, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3302347/chinese-team-wins-award-ai-booster-may-help-counter-us-chip-ban
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Mooncake Repository, GitHub, https://github.com/kvcache-ai/Mooncake
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Create PPTs for FREE using Kimi Slides in 5 Minutes, Analytics Vidhya, September 3, 2025, https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2025/09/kimi-slides/
  17. ↑ Moonshot AI's Kimi assistant offers 'agent mode' for creating multi-page websites, slides, South China Morning Post, https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3326859/moonshot-ais-kimi-assistant-offers-agent-mode-creating-multi-page-websites-slides
  18. ↑ Moonshot AI's Kimi Assistant Launches Agent Mode for Websites and Slides, Devicology, https://devicology.com/news/moonshot-ai-kimi-assistant-agent-mode/10603/
  19. ↑ Moonshot AI Open Platform - Kimi Large Language Model API Service, https://platform.moonshot.ai/
  20. ↑ Dark Side of the Moon: The AGI Company that has Raised More Than USD 300 million in Angel Round Financing, TMTPost, October 19, 2023, https://www.tmtpost.com/7083049.html
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 China's Moonshot AI zooms to $2.5B valuation, raising $1B for an LLM focused on long context, TechCrunch, February 28, 2024, https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/moonshot-ai-funding-china/
  22. ↑ Alibaba Leads Record Deal to Mint $2.5 Billion China AI Firm, Bloomberg, February 27, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/alibaba-leads-record-deal-to-create-2-5-billion-china-ai-player
  23. ↑ Tencent Joins $300 Million Financing for China's AI Unicorn, Bloomberg, August 5, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-05/tencent-joins-300-million-financing-for-china-s-ai-unicorn
  24. ↑ Moonshot AI (China) 2025 Company Profile, PitchBook, https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/529062-76
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Muon is Scalable for LLM Training, arXiv, February 24, 2025, https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16982
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Researchers from Moonshot AI Introduce Muon and Moonlight, MarkTechPost, February 25, 2025, https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/02/25/researchers-from-moonshot-ai-introduce-muon-and-moonlight-optimizing-large-scale-language-models-with-efficient-training-techniques/
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Moonlight Repository, GitHub, https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Moonlight
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Moonshot AI - Products, Competitors, Financials, CB Insights, https://www.cbinsights.com/company/tsuki-no-anmen
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 AI 2026: China's Moonshot AI Contends For Technical Leadership, Bismarck Analysis, https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/ai-2026-chinas-moonshot-ai-contends
  30. ↑ China's AI start-up Moonshot AI gets US$1 billion boost from Alibaba, others in challenge to OpenAI, South China Morning Post, February 21, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3252758/chinas-ai-start-moonshot-ai-gets-us1-billion-boost-alibaba-others-challenge-openai
  31. ↑ China's tech firms block AI access during high-stakes college entrance exams, Business Insider, June 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/china-disable-ai-college-entrance-exams-gaokao-tencent-bytedance-2025-6
  32. ↑ Kimi也要出海？月之暗面：目前没有开发和发布海外产品计划, The Paper, June 23, 2024, https://www.thepaper.cn/detail/27831071
  33. ↑ Founder of Moonshot AI Cashed out Tens of Millions of USD, Pandaily, April 23, 2024, https://pandaily.com/founder-of-moonshot-ai-cashed-out-tens-of-millions-of-usd/
  34. ↑ Moonshot AI founder's dispute with 5 investors up for arbitration in Hong Kong, South China Morning Post, December 10, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3290051/moonshot-ai-founders-dispute-5-investors-arbitration-hong-kong
  35. ↑ Alleged Misconduct and Conflict of Interest Shake Chinese AI Unicorn, CTOL, December 5, 2024, https://www.ctol.digital/news/moonshot-ai-legal-battle-conflict-of-interest-controversy/
  36. ↑ Moonshot arbitration case advances amid ongoing disputes, TechNode, February 25, 2025, https://technode.com/2025/02/25/moonshot-arbitration-case-advances-amid-ongoing-disputes/
  37. ↑ Moonshot AI: The Chinese Unicorn Revolutionizing Long-Context AI, The Turing Post, https://www.turingpost.com/p/moonshotai
  38. ↑ Kimi-K2-Instruct, Hugging Face, https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct

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