Kimi

What Kimi is

Kimi is an AI chatbot from Moonshot AI. It was officially released in October 2023 and opened to closed-beta testing ^[1], and it became available to the general public on 16 November 2023 ^[1]. Users work with it through conversation: asking questions, pasting in material, and handing it tasks to carry out.

Long context as the defining feature

The first public version supported a lossless context of 128,000 tokens; Wikipedia describes that as up to 200,000 Chinese characters in a single conversation ^[1][2]. Context is the text a model can read at one time within a conversation. The larger the window, the less a user has to cut a long document into pieces and feed it in stages, which changes what kinds of work a chat assistant can be asked to do in one sitting.

In March 2024 a closed beta raised the context window to 2 million Chinese characters ^[1]. The Star reported on 21 May 2024 that Kimi had launched the previous October and that by March it could process up to two million Chinese characters in a single prompt, up from 200,000 ^[3].

Pricing and computing power

The Star reported six top-up plans for Kimi, priced from 5.2 yuan for four days to 399 yuan for a year of priority use ^[3]. The same report said that paying users were prioritised for inference computing power when capacity was short at peak hours ^[3]. Inference is the step in which a trained model actually produces an answer, and it is the part that consumes computing power while a service is running, so capacity at busy hours is a practical constraint for a widely used chatbot.

Features added over time

Context caching entered public beta in July 2024 ^[1]. Caching keeps material that recurs across requests so that it does not have to be processed from scratch each time. On 11 October 2024, Kimi Explore Edition, an autonomous AI search mode, launched ^[1].

Agent features were added afterwards: Kimi-Researcher in June 2025, OK Computer in September 2025, Agent Swarm, and the Kimi Code command-line agent ^[1]. An agent, in this sense, is a system that plans a task, calls tools and works through several steps rather than returning a single reply; a command-line agent does the same kind of work from a terminal instead of a chat window.

The models behind it

The models behind Kimi have included Kimi k1.5 in January 2025, Kimi K2 in July 2025, K2 Thinking in November 2025, K2.5 in January 2026 and K3 in July 2026 ^[1]. The chatbot is the surface through which these successive model generations reach users.

Scale and position

According to a late-2024 report, Kimi's monthly active users exceeded 36 million ^[1]. Measured by monthly active users, Kimi ranked third in August 2024 and seventh in June 2025 ^[1][2]. Such a ranking describes a product's position among competitors at a given measurement point rather than its absolute size, and it moves as the field around it changes.

On 10 July 2026, Moonshot announced co-branded credit cards with the Agricultural Bank of China and American Express ^[2], an arrangement that carries the Kimi brand beyond the software itself.