Kimi K2 Thinking vs Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct is the flagship of Alibaba's Qwen2.5 series, a 72-billion-parameter open-weight model released in September 2024 after training on 18 trillion tokens spanning code, mathematics, and multilingual text. It offers strong generalist performance across coding, instruction-following, and structured reasoning while remaining fully open-weight under Apache 2.0 — a combination that made it a widely referenced model in open-source evaluations and community benchmarking. The 128K context window and built-in structured output support made it a common choice for document analysis and multi-step agentic pipeline development.