Kimi K2 Thinking vs Qwen3-Coder-480B

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

Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on July 22, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 480 billion total parameters and 35 billion active parameters per inference, specifically designed for agentic coding tasks. It features a 256K token native context window (extendable to 1M tokens with extrapolation) and demonstrated competitive performance on agentic coding, browser automation, and tool-use benchmarks. Qwen3-Coder-480B targets automated software engineering, multi-step code agents, and open-source coding deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.