Kimi vs Qwen

Kimi and Qwen side by side on Above the Fog’s AI hype radar, on Oct 29, 2026: Kimi is 💤 Quiet with a hype score of 10 and Qwen is 🚀 Rising with 42. 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, Kimi is the solid line and Qwen 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 — 57% of Kimi’s stories, 87% of Qwen’s
• Usage & adoption — 43% of Kimi’s stories, 14% of Qwen’s
• Agents — 21% of Kimi’s stories, 11% of Qwen’s
• Companies & business — 21% of Kimi’s stories, 4.4% of Qwen’s
• Policy & macro — 7.1% of Kimi’s stories, 2.2% of Qwen’s

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

Qwen: stories behind it

1. Someone built a 32-bit RISC-V CPU directly inside Qwen's model weights so it can execute instructions internaly! — Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA) · Oct 28 · score 936 · 140 comments
2. Qwen4 1M context window — Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA) · Oct 29 · score 526 · 221 comments
3. Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5 — Hacker News (divagr.com) · Oct 29 · score 690 · 145 comments
4. Used Qwen 3.8 flash next on underspeced PC to Root and gut LG TV of spy and adware — Reddit (r/LocalLLaMA) · Oct 28 · score 186 · 33 comments
5. Qwen has alter egos triggered by flipping a single neuron — Hacker News (qwen-neurons-site.vercel.app) · Oct 27 · score 60 · 60 comments

More comparisons

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