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DeepSeek vs. Kimi

LLM Comparison


DeepSeek

DeepSeek

Overview

DeepSeek develops open-weight mixture-of-experts models for reasoning, coding, agents, and efficient long-context inference. DeepSeek V4 is the current generation.


DeepSeek began releasing language models in 2023 with DeepSeek Coder, then gained broad adoption with DeepSeek V3 and the R1 reasoning model in 2024 and 2025. DeepSeek V4, released in April 2026, includes a 284B-parameter Flash model with 13B active parameters and a 1.6T-parameter Pro model with 49B active parameters. Both support one-million-token context windows and are released with open weights under the MIT license.


Initial release: 2023-11-29

Current generation: DeepSeek V4

Kimi

Overview

Kimi is Moonshot AI's open-weight family for long-context reasoning, coding, multimodal agents, and research. Kimi K3 is the current generation.


Moonshot AI launched Kimi in 2023 with an early focus on long-context document understanding. Kimi K3, released in July 2026, is a 2.8T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 104B active parameters. It combines native vision, a one-million-token context window, long-horizon coding, knowledge work, reasoning, and agent orchestration. The full model weights are available under the Kimi K3 License.


Initial release: 2023-10-09

Current generation: Kimi K3

DeepSeek

Kimi

Products & Features
Instruct Models
Coding Capability
Customization
Finetuning
Open Source
License MIT Kimi K3 License
Model Sizes 284B (13B active), 1.6T (49B active) 2.8T (104B active)