Kimi K2 vs Mistral Small 3 24B

Moonshot AI

Kimi K2, released by Moonshot AI on July 11, 2025, is an open-weight Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window (expanded from 128K in an September 2025 update) and demonstrated strong performance on agentic coding benchmarks. Kimi K2 targets software engineering agents, tool-use workflows, and open-source deployments under a modified MIT license.

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.