The beginning of 2025 marked a significant shift in the global artificial intelligence landscape when DeepSeek's viral success challenged America's perceived dominance in the AI race. The Chinese chatbot demonstrated that building powerful models comparable to ChatGPT and Gemini was possible at significantly lower costs. This breakthrough opened the floodgates for numerous Chinese AI companies to emerge and compete on the world stage.
China's AI Revolution Gains Momentum
Since DeepSeek's remarkable entry, China has witnessed an explosion of AI innovation with companies like Alibaba launching Qwen, Baidu introducing Ernie, and Moonshot AI developing Kimi. These new Chinese models have been consistently narrowing the performance gap with Western counterparts like ChatGPT. The competition has intensified to the point where a new Chinese model has now achieved what seemed impossible just months ago - outperforming established leaders in critical benchmarks.
Kimi K2 Thinking: The New Benchmark Leader
Earlier this week, Moonshot AI released its groundbreaking Kimi K2 Thinking model, positioning it as a direct competitor to industry heavyweights GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 Thinking. According to official data released by the company, Kimi K2 Thinking achieved a remarkable 44.9% score in the prestigious Humanity's Last Exam benchmark, surpassing both ChatGPT's 41.7% and Claude Sonnet 4.5 Thinking's 32%.
The dominance continued in the BrowseComp benchmark, which evaluates AI chatbots' performance in agentic web-browsing and search-related tasks. Here, Kimi K2 Thinking secured an impressive 60.2% score, significantly ahead of GPT-5's 54.9% and Claude Sonnet 4.5 Thinking's 24.1%.
Areas for Improvement and Current Limitations
Despite these impressive achievements, Kimi K2 Thinking still trails behind in coding-related tasks. In the LiveCodeBench V6 benchmark, which measures AI performance in competitive programming, the new model scored 83.1%, while GPT-5 achieved 87% and Claude Sonnet 4.5 Thinking managed 64%.
The performance pattern wasn't consistent across all evaluations. In LMArena's ranking system, Gemini 2.5 Pro maintains the top position with GPT-5 occupying the fourth spot, indicating that the AI race remains highly competitive across different specializations.
How Indian Users Can Access Kimi K2 Thinking
For Indian users interested in experiencing this cutting-edge AI technology, Kimi K2 Thinking is readily available through the Kimi website or mobile applications on both Android and Apple App Stores. The platform offers a significant advantage for users considering a switch from established alternatives - it's completely free with no hard limits for casual users.
This stands in stark contrast to OpenAI's approach, where free ChatGPT users cannot access the GPT-5 (High) model and face strict message restrictions of just 10 messages every 5 hours. While OpenAI offers its ₹399/year ChatGPT Go subscription for free in India, this too comes with message limitations that don't affect Kimi users.
The emergence of Kimi K2 Thinking as a serious competitor to Western AI models signals a new era in artificial intelligence development, where geographical boundaries no longer dictate technological superiority and users benefit from increased choice and accessibility.
