Moonshot AI appears to have reached the summit for Chinese-developed open-source AI models with Kimi K2 Thinking – widely touted as the best open AI model in the market. “Today is a turning point in AI. A Chinese open-source model is #1,” wrote Deedy Das, a partner at early stage venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, in a November 7 post on X when Kimi K2 Thinking was released. “Seminal moment in AI.” In a blog post on online developer platform GitHub, Moonshot AI researchers said Kimi K2 Thinking set “new records across benchmarks that assess reasoning, coding and agent capabilities” after the new model – a reasoning variant of its Kimi K2 model – outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in several benchmarks. The new model has 1 trillion parameters and is designed with mixture-of-experts architecture, which mimics the human approach to problem-solving by dividing complex tasks among a team of specialised experts. Earlier this week, Kimi K2 Thinking was the most popular model on open-source developer platform Hugging Face. "Is this another DeepSeek moment?" asked Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, in a November 11 post on X. "Should we expect this every couple of months now?" Kimi K2 Thinking's benchmark results reflected how #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 companies had closed the performance gap between their open-source models and US peers’ closed-source models. Previously, new Chinese open-source AI models achieved international popularity, but were behind US closed-source models in terms of overall performance. https://moonshotai.github..