While most people focused on Grok, there was another model release that got uniformly high praise: Kimi K2 from Moonshot.ai.

It's definitely a good model, sir, especially for a cheap-to-run open model.

It is plausibly the best model for creative writing, outright. It is refreshingly different, and opens up various doors through which one can play. And it proves the value of its new architecture.

It is not an overall SoTA frontier model, but it is not trying to be one.

The reasoning model version is coming. Price that in now.

Introducing Kimi K2

Introducing the latest model that matters, Kimi K2.

Hello, Kimi K2! Open-Source Agentic Model!

1T total / 32B active MoE model

SOTA on SWE Bench Verified, Tau2 & AceBench among open models

Strong in coding and agentic tasks

Multimodal & thought-mode not supported for [...]

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Outline:

(00:45) Introducing Kimi K2

(02:24) Having a Moment

(03:29) Another Nimble Effort

(05:37) On Your Marks

(07:48) Everybody Loves Kimi, Baby

(13:09) Okay, Not Quite Everyone

(14:06) Everyone Uses Kimi, Baby

(15:42) Write Like A Human

(25:32) What Happens Next

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First published:
July 16th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qsyj37hwh9N8kcopJ/kimi-k2

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Spider chart and bar graphs showing AI model abilities and performance metrics. Two radial charts display

Leaderboard comparing LLM creative writing performance, titled

Market share graph showing OpenRouter token distribution by model author, July 2024-2025.

Eight benchmark comparison charts showing performance metrics for various AI language models. Charts include SWE-bench, LiveCodeBench, AceBench, GPQA-Diamond, and others.

Heatmap comparing emotional intelligence benchmarks for various AI language models titled

Statistical comparison table showing performance metrics for 30 AI language models.

The table displays key metrics including Root TTR, Mass, Unique count, Total count, and Average Length, with moonshotai/kimi-k2-instruct leading with the highest Root TTR score of 16.7450.

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“Kimi K2” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma)