Kimi K3: Full History & Timeline

Kimi K3 is a frontier large language model developed by Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI, released in 2025 with strong performance on reasoning, mathematics, and…

Moonshot AI Founded in Beijing, Targeting Long-Context Language Models

Moonshot AI was incorporated in early 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a researcher with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and prior experience at Google Brain and Tsinghua Univ…

Moonshot AI Raises $1 Billion Seed Round, One of China's Largest AI Financings

Within months of incorporation, Moonshot AI closed a funding round reportedly valued at approximately $1 billion, making it one of the fastest Chinese AI startups to rea…

Moonshot AI Launches Kimi Chat with 200K Token Context Window

In October 2023, Moonshot AI released Kimi Chat to the Chinese public — a conversational AI assistant built on its proprietary model and capable of processing up to 200,…

Kimi Extends Context Window to 1 Million Tokens, Redefining Long-Document AI

In early 2024, Moonshot AI announced that Kimi's context window had been extended to 1 million tokens — a capability it demonstrated by processing a full-length English…

Moonshot AI Closes Series B at $2.5 Billion Valuation Amid China AI Boom

By February 2024, Moonshot AI had raised a further round that valued the company at approximately $2.5 billion, with participation from HongShan, IDG Capital, and additi…

Kimi Launches Multimodal Vision Capabilities, Processing Images and Documents T…

In mid-2024, Moonshot AI rolled out multimodal capabilities to Kimi, enabling the model to process images, charts, diagrams, and scanned documents alongside text. The up…

Moonshot AI Releases Kimi Explorer, an Agentic AI Mode for Multi-Step Web Tasks

Late 2024 saw Moonshot AI release Kimi Explorer, an agentic product layer built on top of the Kimi model that could autonomously browse the web, compile research reports…

Kimi K1.5 Multimodal Reasoning Model Released with Chain-of-Thought Advances

In January 2025, Moonshot AI released Kimi K1.5, a reasoning-focused model that incorporated chain-of-thought training techniques similar to those used in OpenAI's o1. T…

Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K3: Frontier Reasoning Model Available via API

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 in May 2025, marking the most significant model launch in the company's history. K3 is a frontier large language model optimised for reasoni…

Kimi K3 Posts Competitive Scores on MATH-500, GPQA, and LiveCodeBench

Following K3's release, independent evaluators and the AI research community began publishing comparative benchmark analyses. On MATH-500, K3 scored in the high-90th per…

Indian and Global Developer Community Begins Evaluating Kimi K3 as GPT-4o Alter…

Within days of K3's launch, developer communities on platforms including Hugging Face, Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA, and Indian tech forums began sharing evaluations, prompt co…