The Open-Source Inflection Point: Why Kimi K2 Thinking Changes Everything About AI's Competitive Dynamics. Again.
Kimi K2 Thinking beats the frontier for a fraction of the cost. What’s next for the future of LLMs.
Kimi K2 Thinking marks a pivotal inflection point in AI’s evolution. It’s the first open-source model to reach and surpass the performance frontier of proprietary systems like GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 in reasoning and agentic capabilities. At just $4.6 million for training (non-official numbers), it achieved that performance at just a fraction of their cost. Open source is catching up fast, and so is China, but at very different economics. If this pace holds, next year’s leaderboard will look very different.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Decoding Discontinuity to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.