DeepSeek vs Kimi

DeepSeek and Kimi side by side on Above the Fog’s AI hype radar, on Oct 29, 2026: DeepSeek is 💤 Quiet with a hype score of 12 and Kimi is 💤 Quiet with 10. The radar’s curated relations list them as competitors.

Data note: 7 of the last 14 days were not collected live. No collection ran on Oct 22–Oct 28, or a later run refilled those days at once. Every hype score is measured against the 14 days before it and those days are thin, so the scores, the stages and the week-over-week theme trends may read higher than they are until they leave that window on Nov 12.

At a glance

Hype score, last 30 days

Both hype scores by day, newest first; on the page’s chart, DeepSeek is the solid line and Kimi the dashed one.

Shared themes

What the stories of both topics in the last 7 days are about, as classified by the Jev model (a story can carry several themes):

• Models — 77% of DeepSeek’s stories, 57% of Kimi’s
• Agents — 27% of DeepSeek’s stories, 21% of Kimi’s
• Usage & adoption — 18% of DeepSeek’s stories, 43% of Kimi’s
• Companies & business — 6.1% of DeepSeek’s stories, 21% of Kimi’s

DeepSeek: stories behind it

1. DeepSeek V5 spotted in DeepSeek Harness tests — are we getting closer to a release? — Reddit (r/DeepSeek) · Oct 28 · score 436 · 26 comments
2. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 at 41 tok/s on one 3090 — Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA) · Oct 28 · score 154 · 107 comments
3. Deepseek 4.1 Flash 1017 is the highest ranking open weights model on FrontierCode 2.0, a private benchmark. Its ahead of Kimi K3.1 Pro, & Gemini Argon — Reddit (r/DeepSeek) · Oct 28 · score 153 · 17 comments
4. CrowdStrike: China-linked hackers used AI tool ARTEX with a DeepSeek LLM and another model to target 200+ organizations in 11 days, compromising at least nine — Techmeme (NBC News) · Oct 30 · score 4 · 5 comments
5. DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B days after US restrictions — Hacker News (techcrunch.com) · Oct 27 · score 4 · 1 comment

Kimi: stories behind it

1. Deepseek 4.1 Flash 1017 is the highest ranking open weights model on FrontierCode 2.0, a private benchmark. Its ahead of Kimi K3.1 Pro, & Gemini Argon — Reddit (r/DeepSeek) · Oct 28 · score 153 · 17 comments
2. I gave Kimi K3.1 Pro and GPT-6 Astra the same 4 tasks on different PCs. They built almost the same night market, and Kimi cost $21 vs $54 — Reddit (r/vibecoding) · Oct 28 · score 9 · 5 comments
3. Kimi K3.1 Pro: 1M-token open model, best public cybersecurity score (64%), weights coming Nov 4 — but bigger context is not automatically smarter — Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA) · Oct 28 · score 1 · 0 comments
4. Episode 125: Kimi K3.1 Pro Brings 1M-Token Context to OpenRouter — Podcasts (Apple + niche RSS) (AgentStack Daily) · Oct 28
5. Kimi K2.6: Open Source BEATS GPT-5.4 and Opus? — Podcasts (Apple + niche RSS) (Alejandro AO) · Oct 30

More comparisons

• DeepSeek vs GLM
• DeepSeek vs Hunyuan
• DeepSeek vs Qwen
• Kimi vs Qwen