“Most mornings I learn more from New Items than I do from all of the traditional papers I read combined.” — Michael Blair, former presiding partner, Debevoise & Plimpton.
1. Excitement is growing among researchers about a second, powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model to emerge from China, after DeepSeek shocked the world with its launch of R1 in January. The performance of Kimi K2, launched on 11 July by Beijing-based company Moonshot AI, matches or surpasses that of Western rivals, as well as some DeepSeek models, across various benchmarks, according to the firm. In particular it appears to excel at coding, scoring high in tests such as LiveCodeBench, a way of evaluating AIs that challenges models on code-related tasks. As with DeepSeek’s models, Kimi K2 is open-weight, meaning it can be downloaded and built upon by researchers for free. It can also be accessed via an application programming interface (API) for a fraction of the price of leading proprietary models, such as Claude 4 from Anthropic, based in San Francisco, California. (Sources: nature.com, moonshotai.github.io)
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