The latest Chinese generative artificial intelligence model to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT is offering coding capabilities — at a lower price. Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot released on late Friday night its Kimi K2 model: a low-cost, open source large language model — the two factors that underpinned China-based DeepSeek’s industry disruption in January. Open-source technology provides source code access for free, an approach that few U.S. tech giants have taken, other than Meta and Google to some extent. Coincidentally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced early Saturday that there would be an indefinite delay of its first open-source model yet again due to safety concerns. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on Kimi K2. One of Kimi K2′s strengths is in writing computer code for applications, an area in which businesses see potential to reduce or replace staff with generative AI. OpenAI’s U.S. rival Anthropic focused on coding with its Claude Opus 4 model released in late May. In its release announcement on social media platforms X and GitHub, Moonshot claimed Kimi K2 surpassed Claude Opus 4 on two benchmarks, and had better overall performance than OpenAI’s coding-focused GPT-4.1 model, based on several industry metrics. “No doubt [Kimi K2 is] a globally competitive model, and it’s open sourced,” Wei Sun, principal analyst in artificial intelligence at Counterpoint, said in an email Monday.

Full story : Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot released late Friday night its Kimi K2 model as a low-cost, open source large language model, with a focus on coding capabilities.