The Rise of the AI Tigers_China’s Fast-Moving Challenge to the Global AI Race

overview of the newly released Kimi K2 Thinking model by Moonshot AI, a rapidly emerging Chinese lab in the generative AI space. The model is described as a large-scale, open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that excels due to its agentic and interleaved reasoning capabilities, allowing it to perform hundreds of sequential tool calls to solve complex problems. Comparisons frequently position Kimi K2 Thinking as a strong competitor to closed models like GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5, particularly on advanced benchmarks like Humanity’s Last Exam and in creative writing, despite concerns about its verbosity and token efficiency. Furthermore, one source shifts focus to the enterprise application of AI by detailing Google's Gemini API and Vertex AI RAG Engine offerings, which facilitate the rapid deployment of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems grounded in proprietary business data.