moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct
by moonshot
Pricing
Kimi-K2-Instruct by Moonshot AI
Overview
Kimi-K2-Instruct is a 1T-parameter-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) instruction-tuned language model developed by Moonshot AI. Released in July 2025, it is optimized for multi-turn chat, code generation, reasoning, and agentic tool use. Despite its trillion-parameter size, only 32B parameters are active per forward pass, making it highly efficient.
Kimi-K2 ranks among the top open-source models, rivaling proprietary systems like GPT-4 and Claude Opus in many key benchmarks — while remaining fully accessible to the community.
Key Features
- 🧠 1T parameter MoE model with 32B active per token
- 🧪 State-of-the-art benchmark scores in coding, math, and agentic tasks
- 🔧 Instruction-tuned for multi-turn conversations and complex reasoning
- 🔗 Tool use support with function-calling and plugin frameworks
- 🧰 Optimized for long context and API integration
- 📤 Open weights via Hugging Face with flexible licensing
Use Cases
- 💬 Chatbots and AI agents
- 🛠️ Developer copilots and code assistants
- 🧮 Mathematical reasoning and symbolic tasks
- 📚 Academic research and fine-tuning experiments
- 🏢 Enterprise agent frameworks with API deployment
Limitations
- ⚙️ Requires high-end GPU or distributed setup for local use
- 📉 No official fine-tuned version for RLHF yet (though 3rd-party versions exist)
- 📄 Not yet optimized for low-resource (edge) deployment
Performance Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Kimi-K2-Instruct | GPT-4.1 | Claude 3 Opus | Gemini 1.5 Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 89.5% | 86.4% | 88.7% | 84.5% |
| HumanEval (Code) | 82.4% | 83.1% | 79.5% | 75.3% |
| LiveCodeBench v6 | 53.7% (pass@1) | 44.7% | 42.2% | 38.0% |
| SWE-bench Verified | 65.8% | 63.7% | 58.1% | 55.0% |
| AIME 2024 | 69.6% | 68.5% | 64.9% | 60.2% |
Model Comparison
| Model Name | Architecture | Parameters | MoE Routing | Audio/Multimodal | Open Source | API Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi-K2-Instruct | MoE | 1T (32B active) | Top-2 of 64 experts | No (text only) | ✅ Yes | Hugging Face / OpenRouter |
| GPT-4.1 (OpenAI) | Dense | ~1.8T (est.) | ✖ | Tool use, no native audio | ❌ No | OpenAI only |
| Claude 3 Opus | Dense | ~1.2T (est.) | ✖ | Tool use, no audio | ❌ No | Anthropic API |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | Mixture | ~1.5T+ | Yes | Vision + Text | ❌ No | Google Gemini |
| LLaMA 3 70B | Dense | 70B | ✖ | Text only | ✅ Yes | Ollama / HF / Replicate |
| DeepSeek-V3 | MoE | 236B (16B active) | Top-2 | Text only | ✅ Yes | HF / OpenRouter |
Kimi-K2-Instruct redefines the boundary of open LLMs, bringing trillion-scale reasoning to the global community. Whether you’re building tools, agents, or assistants — it’s built for you.