Nathaniel Whittemore

Artificial Analysis again writes, Kimi K2.5 is the first flagship model from Moonshot to support image and video inputs.

This is the first time that the leading OpenWeights model has supported image input, removing a critical barrier to the adoption of OpenWeights models compared to proprietary models from the Frontier Labs.

They point out that this makes a significant difference as compared to other OpenWeights leaders like DeepSeek's V3.2.

Now, anytime we get a model out of China, of course, one aspect of the discourse is what it says for the state of the AI race.

On that front, there were a number of people who took to Twitter slash X to share examples of Kimmy 2.5 claiming that it was clawed.

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Still, overall, even with some of the suspicion of distillation of Western models, the release of 2.5 certainly validates the recent arguments from people like Demis Hassabis that Chinese models are very, very close to the US when it comes to performance, if not yet having had an example of actually pushing the frontier.

As Balazs Nemethi points out, however, the real value in 2.5 is not, as he puts it, pure IQ dominance.

It's about how it does in an actual work environment.

He calls it less chatbot and more employee.

And indeed, there are a couple things that stood out to me about the 2.5 announcement that are really impressive.

One is the way that they're using this multimodal input capability in the context of coding.

They show an example of taking a screen recording of a website, dumping it into Kimmy and asking it to clone it, with Kimmy shipping that code, including UX and interactions.

If this actually works like that, it opens up a significant new frontier in AI coding that you have to imagine that everyone will raise to copy very quickly.

Another thing that Moonshot emphasize is how good 2.5 is at office skills, things like financial modeling in Excel or creating high quality PowerPoints.

Now, again, this could be incredibly valuable when it comes to work, although I haven't really been able to find a ton of examples yet of people testing this out that don't just feel like paid influencer posts.

One that I found that did seem to positively test out these features came from Shafi.

He wrote, this new AI model Kimi from China created a full slide deck from my journal article in one single shot prompt.

I just gave it the keyword and journal name, not even the link or PDF to the article.

It searched the article and found the correct one, developed the contents after reading the paper, created contents for 12 slides, including searching images from internet, asked for suggestions to make edits, which I declined and asked it to go ahead and generated slides in a PowerPoint format.