Kimi K2 Thinking vs Mistral Small 3 24B

Moonshot AI

Kimi K2 Thinking, released by Moonshot AI on November 6, 2025, is a reasoning-focused variant of Kimi K2 with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters, featuring extended chain-of-thought processing for complex problem solving. It builds on K2's agentic coding strengths with additional capabilities for mathematical and scientific reasoning. Kimi K2 Thinking targets open-source deployments requiring deep, deliberate reasoning across coding and analytical domains.

Mistral Small 3 24B

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3 is a 24-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Mistral AI, released in January 2025 as an update to the Mistral Small line with targeted improvements to instruction-following, multilingual reasoning, and structured output quality. Released under Apache 2.0, it was designed for deployment on a single high-VRAM GPU, continuing Mistral's focus on practical efficiency over maximum scale. The model became a widely-used option for teams building internal tooling, customer-facing applications, and local inference pipelines that needed strong general capability without the operational overhead of larger models.