Kimi K2 vs Qwen2 72B Instruct

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2-72B-Instruct is a 72-billion-parameter language model released by Alibaba's Qwen team in June 2024, serving as the flagship of the Qwen2 generation and representing a major step in open-weight multilingual modeling. Trained on data spanning 30+ languages with strong coverage of code and structured reasoning, the model was among the first openly released 70B-class models to demonstrate competitive performance across diverse benchmarks. It established the foundation architecture and training methodology that the Qwen2.5 series would later extend.