Moonshot AI (Chinese name: 月之暗面, meaning "The Dark Side of the Moon," named after the iconic album by the band Pink Floyd) is a Chinese AI company founded in March 2023 in Beijing by three Tsinghua University graduates: Yang Zhilan, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin. As early as October 2023, the company introduced its chatbot Kimi, featuring a then-record-breaking context window of 200,000 Chinese characters, establishing its reputation as a pioneer in long-context AI.
The company systematically pushes the boundaries of efficiency and scalability for large language models (LLMs). In 2024, Kimi scaled its context window to 2 million Chinese characters; in 2025, it unveiled MuonClip (an optimizer that doubles training speed, reduces memory consumption by 50%, and prevents errors), the MoBA attention architecture (which enables context scaling without loss of comprehension), and the inference platform Mooncake (optimized for handling user queries, especially in long-context scenarios). These technologies underpin Kimi K2 — a trillion-parameter MoE model with broad agent capabilities.
Moonshot AI actively supports the open-source ecosystem: it has released a series of models of varying sizes and purposes under a modified MIT license. However, the company achieved true breakthrough status and global recognition with the launch of Kimi K2 — at the time of its release, the world’s largest open-source language model, surpassing the one-trillion-parameter threshold.
Moonshot AI uniquely combines commercial product development (the mass-market Kimi product featuring long-context capabilities, expanded agent functionalities, and inference optimized on the company’s own infrastructure) with deep scientific innovation in AI (MuonClip, MoBA, Mooncake). The company positions itself as a driver of the open-source AI ecosystem, making cutting-edge artifacts accessible to the global community while remaining a commercially successful player, especially within the Chinese market.