Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI (月之暗面, roughly "the dark side of the moon") was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a researcher trained at Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon. Its Kimi assistant made its name on the home market by handling very long contexts — first 200,000 Chinese characters, later millions — which made it practical for reading whole reports and books in one prompt.

The company is counted among China's "AI tigers" alongside Zhipu, MiniMax and Baichuan, and is backed by Alibaba and Tencent. Like DeepSeek, it competes less on marketing than on delivering strong model quality cheaply — at a moment when US export controls make every GPU harder to get hold of.