Head to head
Kimi K2 Instruct vs Kimi K2 Thinking
Kimi K2 Instruct from Moonshot AI against Kimi K2 Thinking from Moonshot AI — specification, price and every benchmark both makers have published, in one table.
Benchmarks
Kimi K2 Thinking leads
Kimi K2 Thinking wins 2 of the 2 benchmarks both models report, Kimi K2 Instruct wins 0, by a wide margin. The average gap across shared tests is 17.4 points.
Price
Same price
Both cost $1.07 per million tokens on a 3:1 input-to-output mix.
What actually differs
- Kimi K2 Thinking takes 262K tokens of context against 131K — 2.0× more room for long documents or a large codebase.
- Kimi K2 Thinking is a reasoning model and the other is not, which usually means better maths and multi-step logic in exchange for higher latency and more billed output tokens.
Scorecard
Which is better at what
Maths, coding, reasoning and the rest — one line each, averaged over the benchmarks both models actually report.
| Category | Kimi K2 Instruct | Kimi K2 Thinking | Better at this |
|---|---|---|---|
| ReasoningOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| MathsOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| CodingSWE-bench Verified, LiveCodeBench | 59.8% | 77.2% | Kimi K2 Thinking+17.4 |
| KnowledgeOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| MultimodalNeither model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| Instruction followingNeither model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| Human preferenceOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| Categories wonOut of 1 comparable | 0 | 1 | Kimi K2 Thinking |
Each category averages only the benchmarks every model here reports, so no one is credited for a test the other did not run. A category with no shared test is marked Not comparable rather than guessed at.
Side by side
Kimi K2 Instruct and Kimi K2 Thinking, row by row
| Attribute | Kimi K2 InstructMoonshot AI | Kimi K2 ThinkingMoonshot AI |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | ||
| MakerWho built it | Moonshot AI | Moonshot AI |
| Released | 2025-07 | 2025-11 |
| ParametersTotal, and active per token for a mixture of experts | 1T total / 32B active | 1T total / 32B active |
| Architecture | MoE | MoE |
| Context windowHow much can go in at once | 131,072 tokens | 262,144 tokens |
| Max output | 16,384 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Input | Text | Text |
| ReasoningSpends extra tokens thinking before it answers | No | Yes |
| Tool calling | Yes | Yes |
| Licence | Modified MIT | Modified MIT |
| Open weightsCan you download and run it yourself | Yes | Yes |
| Price | ||
| Input priceUSD per million tokens in | $0.60 | $0.60 |
| Output priceUSD per million tokens out | $2.50 | $2.50 |
| Blended 3:1A 3-in-to-1-out million-token mix — a fairer single number than input price alone | $1.07 | $1.07 |
| Price note | Open weights — this is a representative hosting rate, not a first-party price. Running it yourself costs only hardware. | Open weights — this is a representative hosting rate, not a first-party price. Running it yourself costs only hardware. |
| Published benchmarks | ||
| MMLU-Pro12,000 reasoning-heavy multiple-choice questions across 14 academic subjects, with ten options instead of four. The harder successor to MMLU. | Not reported | |
| GPQA Diamond198 graduate-level physics, chemistry and biology questions written to be Google-proof. PhD holders in the matching field score about 65%. | Not reported | |
| AIME 2025The American Invitational Mathematics Examination — 15 problems, integer answers, no partial credit. A standard test of multi-step maths reasoning. | Not reported | |
| SWE-bench Verified500 human-validated GitHub issues from real Python repositories. The model must produce a patch that makes the project's own tests pass. | ||
| LiveCodeBenchCompetitive-programming problems collected after each model's training cutoff, so contamination cannot inflate the score. | ||
| LMArena EloElo rating from blind pairwise votes by the public on LMArena. Measures what people prefer, not what is correct. | Not reported | |
| Links | Hugging Face · Full page | Hugging Face · Full page |
| Row verified | 2026-08 | 2026-08 |
Where these numbers come from
Every score on this page is a published figure, taken from the model's own card, system card, technical report or release post, or from a public leaderboard. CorX Labs did not run these evaluations. Most are self-reported by the lab that built the model, which means they were produced under that lab's own choice of prompt, scaffold and number of attempts — so treat them as a starting point for a shortlist, not as a settled ranking.
A score someone other than the model's maker measured is marked Independent and names its measurer. Those are the stronger numbers on this page — an outside harness has no reason to flatter anyone — and there are not many of them.
Where a figure has not been published, the cell reads Not reported rather than an estimate. Nothing here is inferred, interpolated or guessed. Each model records the month its row was last checked. Full method and caveats.
Questions
Kimi K2 Instruct or Kimi K2 Thinking?
Is Kimi K2 Instruct better than Kimi K2 Thinking?
Kimi K2 Thinking wins 2 of the 2 benchmarks both models report, Kimi K2 Instruct wins 0, by a wide margin. The average gap across shared tests is 17.4 points.
Which is cheaper, Kimi K2 Instruct or Kimi K2 Thinking?
Both cost $1.07 per million tokens on a 3:1 input-to-output mix.
What is the difference between Kimi K2 Instruct and Kimi K2 Thinking?
Kimi K2 Thinking takes 262K tokens of context against 131K — 2.0× more room for long documents or a large codebase. Kimi K2 Thinking is a reasoning model and the other is not, which usually means better maths and multi-step logic in exchange for higher latency and more billed output tokens.
