AI Model Release Tracker - Timeline of Major AI Models from 2022-2026

Home/Compare/Kimi K2 Thinking vs o4-mini

Kimi K2 Thinking vs o4-mini

1 vs 0 benchmarks won

Moonshot AI
Kimi K2 Thinking
OpenAI
o4-mini
Overview
CompanyMoonshot AIOpenAI
Release dateNov 6 2025Apr 16 2025
Model type
Open sourceYesNo
Specifications
Parameters
1T
Context window
256k
Benchmarks
Science reasoning
GPQA Diamond
Software engineering
SWE-Bench Verified
71.3%
Multimodal understanding
MMMU
Timeline
Release gapo4-mini shipped 204 days before Kimi K2 Thinking

Which is better: Kimi K2 Thinking or o4-mini?

Kimi K2 Thinking leads o4-mini on 1 of the tracked benchmarks (GPQA Diamond, SWE-Bench Verified, MMMU). o4-mini shipped 204 days before Kimi K2 Thinking, so benchmark comparisons should account for the intervening progress.

Kimi K2 Thinking is an open-source / open-weight model; o4-mini is proprietary.

Direct benchmark comparisons are unavailable — at least one of these models has not published scores on GPQA Diamond, SWE-Bench Verified, or MMMU.

Frequently asked questions

When was Kimi K2 Thinking released?
Kimi K2 Thinking was released by Moonshot AI on Nov 6 2025.
When was o4-mini released?
o4-mini was released by OpenAI on Apr 16 2025.
Is Kimi K2 Thinking or o4-mini open source?
Kimi K2 Thinking is an open-source / open-weight model released by Moonshot AI. o4-mini is a proprietary model released by OpenAI.

Other comparisons