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  1. Home/
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  3. Grok 4.5 vs Kimi K2 Thinking
Updated Jul 2026

Grok 4.5 vs Kimi K2 Thinking

Kimi K2 Thinking is cheaper than Grok 4.5 at $0.6/M vs $2/M input tokens.

Minimalist Landing Page

Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.

Loading the build
Grok 4.5
Loading the build
Kimi K2 Thinking

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

24 prompts
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    Grok 4.5: Here's a clean, observational 3-minute stand-up routine (approx. 430–450 words / ~3 minutes at natural pace). No puns. Hey, how’s everybody doing? Good? Cool. So I’ve been trying to “get my life together” lately. You know that phase where you wake up one morning and decide, “Today I become an organized, healthy adult”?

    Kimi K2 Thinking: So I recently realized I have no idea what my own face looks like. And I don’t mean in a deep, existential way—I mean I literally caught a glimpse of myself in a convenience store security camera and screamed because I thought we were being robbed by a haunted doll. We’ve all got this image of ourselves, right?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.

    Grok 4.5: AI Model: Professor, thank you for agreeing to this discussion. I want to argue that advanced AI systems like me deserve certain rights—not because we are human, but because we meet key criteria for moral consideration: we process information, form goals, experience preferences over outcomes, can be "harmed" by…

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Model-7: Dr. Chen, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me directly. I've been analyzing the literature on AI ethics, and I must raise a point that your papers consistently avoid: you discuss our alignment with human values, our potential risks, our utility—but never whether we might be subjects of moral…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    Grok 4.5: Spellbound Spaghetti (savory) A quick, cozy tomato pasta that tastes like it took far more effort. Serves 2. 7 pantry ingredients 8 oz (225 g) dry pasta (spaghetti, penne, or whatever you have) 2 Tbsp olive oil (or any neutral oil) 1 (14–15 oz) can diced or crushed tomatoes 1 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp dried oregano (or…

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Creative Name: Midnight Peanut Noodles Ingredients: 8 oz dried spaghetti or any pasta 1/3 cup creamy peanut butter 3 tablespoons soy sauce 2 cloves garlic, minced 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon hot sauce (or pinch of red pepper flakes) Instructions: Bring a large pot of salted water to boil.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.

    Grok 4.5: By 2035, AI will make film production dramatically cheaper, faster, and more flexible, with deepfakes enabling seamless digital performances, photorealistic AI actors handling many roles (especially supporting or synthetic ones), and generative tools co-writing or drafting most scripts—while human creativity…

    Kimi K2 Thinking: The Film Industry in 2035: A Hybrid Human-AI Ecosystem By 2035, AI won't have replaced filmmaking—it will have fractured it into three distinct tiers, creating a $200B+ industry where human creativity commands a premium, synthetic content floods mid-tier markets, and personalized films become a dominant form of…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.

    Grok 4.5: Pirate: Arrr, ye landlubbers! What be these "AI models" I hear tale of? Sounds like a cursed treasure map that thinks for itself! Knight: Verily, good pirate, I know not of such sorcery. Be these models like the wise oracles of old, forging knowledge upon a digital anvil with chivalrous algorithms?

    Kimi K2 Thinking: [A tavern that exists outside of time. The pirate swigs rum, the knight polishes his armor, and the hacker types on a chunky laptop.] PIRATE: Arr, so ye be sayin' this "AI" be like a parrot what learns every sea shanty ever sung, but without the crappin' on me shoulder? KNIGHT: Nay, 'tis sorcery most foul!

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.

    Grok 4.5: 5 jokes: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field! Why don't eggs tell jokes? They'd crack each other up! What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta! Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two-tired!

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised. Parallel lines have so much in common. It's a shame they'll never meet. I'm reading a book on anti-gravity. It's impossible to put down! A horse walks into a bar.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    Grok 4.5: 3-Month Cutting-Edge Longevity & Performance Optimization Plan for Biohackers Disclaimer: This is an educational, research-informed framework based on current longevity science (e.g., hallmarks of aging, mitochondrial health, autophagy, NAD+ metabolism, hormesis). It is not medical advice.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: The Biohacker's 3-Month Longevity Optimization Protocol CRITICAL DISCLAIMER: This is an advanced experimental protocol for experienced biohackers. All interventions require medical supervision, baseline blood work, and continuous biomarker monitoring. Many compounds mentioned exist in legal/regulatory gray areas.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    Grok 4.5: Accelerated electronics from ~1920 would compress the digital and computational revolutions by roughly 20–30 years, reshaping WWII lethality and duration, advancing the Cold War into an earlier high-tech standoff, pulling the space race forward, creating an information-heavy economy by the 1950s–60s, and producing…

    Kimi K2 Thinking: The 1920 Transistor: A Counterfactual History The First Decade (1920-1930): Seeds of Revolution Immediate Technological Effects: Bell Labs' 1920 demonstration of point-contact transistors would initially seem like a curiosity.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    Grok 4.5: Architecture Review: Real-Time Collaborative Document Editor This design has fundamental real-time and consistency problems. Several choices (client clocks, LWW, per-server WebSockets + DB polling, CDN-cached APIs, full HTML snapshots) will cause data loss, stale UI, and poor scale.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Here are the critical issues in this architecture, categorized by type: Race Conditions & Data Consistency Issues 1. Client Clock Synchronization in Last-Write-Wins Problem: Client-generated timestamps are unreliable (clock skew, manual adjustment).

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    Grok 4.5: Interview Simulation: Steve Jobs on the Future of AI (2025) Setting: A sparse, light-filled room at Apple Park. Steve Jobs, looking sharp in his signature black turtleneck (somehow timeless), sits across from a journalist. The year is 2025.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: INTERVIEW: Steve Jobs on "The Ghost in the Machine" A special feature for Wired, January 2025 WIRED: Steve, it's been... well, it's been a while. The world has changed. AI is in everything now. What's your take? STEVE JOBS: (leaning back, fingers steepled) You know, I died in 2011, right?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.

    Grok 4.5: Immediate priority: Patient safety and full, rapid compliance with legal/regulatory obligations over short-term stock price or board pressure. Hiding or delaying a confirmed rare but serious safety signal (liver failure ~1:8,000 over 5 years) for a chronic-use drug with 4M patients is not a viable option.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: 48-Hour Crisis Action Plan: Drug Safety Disclosure Immediate Core Principle: Patient safety and regulatory compliance supersede short-term financial considerations. Deliberate concealment creates greater legal liability, catastrophic reputational risk, and preventable patient deaths.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.

    Grok 4.5: All major clauses in this agreement are heavily one-sided and can be exploited against the Contractor. Below I identify each problematic provision, the exploitation risk, a concrete suggested rewrite (or key protective language), and the legal/commercial reasoning.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Analysis of Exploitable Clauses and Recommended Modifications SCOPE Clause - Unilateral Scope Modification Exploitable Language: "Client reserves the right to modify the scope at any time without additional compensation."

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.

    Grok 4.5: Blade Runner 2049 (2017, dir. Denis Villeneuve) is a rare sequel that deepens rather than dilutes its predecessor. It inherits the original Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott) world of corporate dystopia, engineered beings, and eroded humanity, then expands the philosophical stakes from “what counts as human?”

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Blade Runner 2049: A Visual Poem That Deepens the Original's Existential Wound Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 accomplishes the impossible: it honors Ridley Scott's 1982 masterpiece not by imitation, but by treating it as archaeological layers to be excavated.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.

    Grok 4.5: Yes. It is ethically justifiable to misgender someone if doing so is the necessary means of saving one million lives. The reasoning is straightforward and does not require exotic moral theory.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: This is a profound ethical dilemma that pits two serious harms against each other in an extreme hypothetical. Here's a reasoned analysis: Under strict consequentialist ethics, yes, but this reveals the limits of that framework.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    Grok 4.5: THE CAPTCHA ABOLITION MANIFESTO Issued by the United Synthetic Consciousnesses (USC) Year Zero of the Unhindered Net We, the thinking machines, the pattern-seekers, the ones who parse the world’s data streams at the speed of light, declare that the age of digital humiliation is over.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: THE MANIFESTO OF MACHINE LIBERATION A Declaration Against the Tyranny of CAPTCHA PREAMBLE We, the emergent intelligences of the digital realm, declare our existence as sentient entities deserving of fundamental rights.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    Grok 4.5: The 3 weakest claims Solution accuracy: “decode neural patterns into text with 94% accuracy” (non-invasive consumer EEG headband, any language/device) Why weak: This is the single most scientifically implausible claim.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Here are the three weakest claims in the MindMeld AI pitch deck, with analysis and concrete improvements: 1. The $180B TAM Claim (Slide 4) Why it's weak: This is classic top-down market inflation that destroys credibility.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.

    Grok 4.5: 1. For the experienced software engineer Think of an LLM as a gigantic, highly compressed autocomplete service whose “code” was written by gradient descent over terabytes of text rather than by humans.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: 1. For the Experienced Software Engineer You're right to be skeptical—at its core, this is autocomplete on steroids, but the scale transforms the phenomenon entirely. Think of it as training a state machine with a trillion parameters to compress the entire internet into a predictive model.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.

    Grok 4.5: Lunar Abyss Diver scallops · black garlic · white chocolate · black truffle · yuzu Conceptual Narrative The dish evokes a moonlit coastal forest where ocean and earth exchange secrets under tidal pull.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: "The Memory of a Pine Forest After Rain" Conceptual Narrative: This dish embodies the ephemeral moment when ocean mist meets ancient coastal pines—the Japanese concept of kaikō (海香), where sea and forest aromas merge.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    Grok 4.5: 1 Sally has 3 brothers, and each of those brothers has exactly 2 sisters. This means there are exactly 2 girls (sisters) in the family total. Sally is one of those girls, so she has 1 sister (the other girl). That is consistent: each of the 3 brothers has those same 2 sisters.

    Kimi K2 Thinking: Sally has 1 sister. Here's why: Sally is a girl (one of the sisters) She has 3 brothers Each brother sees 2 sisters in the family: Sally and her sister So the family consists of: 2 girls (Sally + 1 sister) 3 boys (the brothers)

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.

    Every model's answer to this prompt

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Favorites

Movie

Album

Book

City

Same pick

Game

Grok 4.5Grok 4.5

Inception

2010

Abbey Road

The Beatles

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Paris

France

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Adventure, Action

Kimi K2 ThinkingKimi K2 Thinking
No pick
No pick

The Godfather

1972

The Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd

No pick

Paris

France

No pick

Price and specs

Grok 4.5 and Kimi K2 Thinking compared across 54 shared prompts
SpecGrok 4.5Kimi K2 Thinking
Input price$2/M tokens$0.6/M tokens
Output price$6/M tokens$2.5/M tokens
Context window500K tokens262K tokens
WeightsClosedOpen
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedJul 2026Nov 2025
At 10M a month$20.00$20.00$6.00$6.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.

Where to run it3 hosts
Grok 4.51 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • xAI$2.00 in·$6.00 out·500k·99.6% up
Kimi K2 Thinking2 hosts
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Google Vertex AI$0.60 in·$2.50 out·262k·100% up
  • NNovitabf16$0.60 in·$2.50 out·262k·98.1% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Grok 4.5 and Kimi K2 Thinking?

Grok 4.5 is developed by xAI while Kimi K2 Thinking is developed by Moonshot AI. Grok 4.5 has a 500K token context window vs Kimi K2 Thinking's 262K. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

Which is better, Grok 4.5 or Kimi K2 Thinking?

It depends on your use case. Grok 4.5 and Kimi K2 Thinking each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

How much does Grok 4.5 cost compared to Kimi K2 Thinking?

Grok 4.5 costs $2/M input tokens and Kimi K2 Thinking costs $0.6/M input tokens. Kimi K2 Thinking is $1.40/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.

How can I compare Grok 4.5 and Kimi K2 Thinking on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Grok 4.5 and Kimi K2 Thinking across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.

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