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LLM Index

Kimi vs. Qwen

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

Attribute Kimi Qwen
Developer Moonshot AI Alibaba Cloud
Current generation Kimi K3 Qwen 3.8
Initial release 2023-10-09 2023-09-13
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Kimi K3 License Mixed; Apache 2.0 open weights and hosted previews
Model sizes 2.8T (104B active) Undisclosed for Qwen 3.8 preview
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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

Qwen

Qwen is Alibaba's broad family of open and hosted models for reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding, and agents. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current generation.

Qwen, formerly Tongyi Qianwen, is a family of language and multimodal models developed by Alibaba. It includes general-purpose, coding, vision-language, audio, embedding, and reasoning variants. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current hosted flagship, with support for multimodal and agentic workflows. Earlier Qwen generations, including Qwen 3.6 checkpoints, remain available as Apache 2.0 open weights; availability and licensing should therefore be checked per model.

Further reading

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