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LLM Index

Kimi vs. MiniMax

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute Kimi MiniMax
Developer Moonshot AI MiniMax
Current generation Kimi K3 MiniMax M3
Initial release 2023-10-09 2025-01-15
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Kimi K3 License MiniMax Community
Model sizes 2.8T (104B active) 428B (23B active)
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Kimi

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.

Further reading

MiniMax

MiniMax is an open-weight model family spanning language, reasoning, multimodal, and agentic workloads. MiniMax M3 is the current generation.

MiniMax introduced the open MiniMax-01 series in January 2025 and followed it with the M1 and M2 reasoning and agent models. MiniMax M3, released in June 2026, is a 428B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with about 23B active parameters. It combines native image and video understanding, a one-million-token context window, sparse attention, computer use, coding, and long-horizon agent capabilities.

Further reading

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