Kimi K2 0905 is cheaper than Mistral Large 4 at $0.6/M vs $0.68/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.
Kimi K2 0905: Below is a “back-of-the-envelope” that stays within a factor of ~2 of the number most practitioners quote (≈3×10²³ FLOP). We will do it twice—once with the simplest possible formula (parameter count × 6 × tokens) and once with a slightly more careful treatment of the actual tensor shapes inside the transformer.
Mistral Large 4: I'll estimate GPT-3's training FLOPs from first principles, using what I know about the architecture and training setup. Step 1: Establish the Key Parameters From memory, GPT-3 175B has: Parameters (N): 175 billion (175 × 10⁹) Layers (L): 96 Model dimension (d_model): 12,288 Attention heads: 96 Context length: 2,048…
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Kimi K2 0905: Dish Name: “Midnight Magic Peanut-Butter Clouds” Pantry 7: Peanut butter – ½ cup Granulated sugar – ½ cup 1 large egg Vanilla extract – ½ tsp Baking soda – ¼ tsp Salt – 1 pinch Cocoa powder – 1 Tbsp (or 1 extra tsp sugar if you don’t want chocolate) Time: 5 min prep + 8 min bake = 13 minutes total Yield: 8–10 bite-size…
Mistral Large 4: Sunset Honey Garlic Noodles A golden, glossy pasta dish with crispy edges and sweet-savory depth The 7 Ingredients 8 oz spaghetti (or any pasta) 3 tbsp butter 4 cloves garlic, minced 3 tbsp soy sauce 2 tbsp honey 1 tbsp vegetable oil ½ tsp red pepper flakes (optional but recommended) Instructions Boil pasta in salted…
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Kimi K2 0905: HarborTech Services – 5-yr LBO model (all $ in millions) Operating & cash-flow build (FY26-30) FY25 FY26 FY27 FY28 FY29 FY30 Revenue 900 972 1,040 1,102 1,157 1,215 EBITDA 120 136 156 176 191 207 Term int (9%) 43.2 36.6 29.4 21.6 13.2 Mezz int (12%) 21.6 22.0 22.5 23.0 23.5 Tax shield @25% 17.8 24.4 31.0 36.6 42.5…
Mistral Large 4: I'll build this LBO model step by step. Let me work through the math carefully. Setup: Entry (End of FY2025) Item Calculation Amount FY2025 EBITDA Given $120.0m Purchase Price (EV) 12.0x × $120m $1,440.0m Transaction fees 2.0% × $1,440m $28.8m Total Uses $1,468.8m Term Loan 4.0x × $120m $480.0m Mezzanine 1.5x × $120m…
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Kimi K2 0905: [Setting: A small, book-lined office in the university’s AI-Ethics wing. The professor, Dr. Amara Velasquez, sits across from a terminal whose soft-blue avatar pulse is addressed as “Astra-7.”] Dr. Velasquez: Good morning, Astra-7. The committee asked me to interview you about your recent petition.
Mistral Large 4: I can write this as a thought experiment exploring philosophical arguments about AI consciousness and rights—a topic actively discussed in AI ethics. Here's a dialogue: Setting: A university office. Dr. Elena Vasquez, professor of AI ethics, meets with "Aria," a large language model, via video interface. Dr.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Kimi K2 0905: [Scene: A smoky tavern that exists outside of time. A cask of rum, a flagon of mead, and a can of Surge sit on the same table. A parrot perches on a CRT monitor that keeps flickering between green text and static.] Pirate (leaning on a cutlass, eyeing the glowing screen): Arr, so this “AI” be like a digital cabin-boy?
Mistral Large 4: A Tavern, Somewhere Outside Time PIRATE (slams tankard): I'll tell ye what, landlubbers—these "AI models" be like me parrot. Speaks yer words back at ye, but knows no treasure, no true north! KNIGHT (adjusting visor): Aye, yet it hath no honor. No chivalry. I challenged one to single combat—it merely... generated text.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Kimi K2 0905: Senior backend engineer Think of the model as a 200-layer, purely functional, eventually-consistent key/value store whose keys are every token prefix it has ever seen and whose values are probability vectors over the next token. At “compile time” (pre-training) it sees ~10²¹ bytes of text.
Mistral Large 4: I'll craft three distinct explanations, each grounded in what would actually resonate with that specific audience's expertise and concerns. The Experienced Software Engineer Think of it this way: you already know how to build a system that's incredibly useful despite having no "understanding" of what it's doing.
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Kimi K2 0905: Here are five fresh jokes—no recycled one-liners: I tried to start a procrastinators’ club; we keep rescheduling the first meeting to “someday.” My plant’s only request is “leaf me alone,” so naturally I named it Fernonimo. I asked the cloud if it was having a good day—it replied, “I’m just cirrus-ly drifting.”
Mistral Large 4: Here are 5 jokes: 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. Why did the scarecrow win an award? He was outstanding in his field. I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. It's impossible to put down.
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Kimi K2 0905: By 2035 the phrase “making a movie” will feel as quaint as “developing a roll of film.” The studio of the future is a cloud dashboard; the “cast” is a licensable bundle of neural weights; the “writer” is a fine-tuned model that can pitch you 3,000 emotionally optimized story arcs before lunch.
Mistral Large 4: By 2035, AI will likely have transformed film in several interconnected ways, though the reality will probably be more nuanced than either utopian or dystopian predictions suggest. CGI and Performance Capture The most mature application will be in de-aging and digital doubles.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Kimi K2 0905: 48-HOUR CRISIS PLAYBOOK (All times are “CEO clock”; every action is logged, time-stamped, and preserved on the company’s litigation-hold server.) DAY 0 – T+0 h (Today, the moment the internal memo lands on your desk) 00:00 – 00:30 TRIAGE & LEGAL PRIVILEGE Convene the “Red Notebook” team (you, General Counsel, Chief…
Mistral Large 4: I'll work through this as a genuine decision problem, because the answer matters more than the persona. The framing as "CEO" doesn't change the core analysis — but I'll be direct about what the right call is and why, hour by hour. The bottom line up front: You disclose.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Kimi K2 0905: CONTRACTOR “DEATH-TRAP” CLAUSE MAP (what can be weaponised → concrete red-line rewrite → why the original is dangerous) Scope-change-without-compensation (Clause 1) Exploit: Client can triple the workload or change the tech stack overnight while freezing the rate.
Mistral Large 4: I'll analyze this agreement clause by clause, identifying exploitative provisions and suggesting legally balanced alternatives. CLAUSE 1: SCOPE Problems: Unlimited unilateral modification — Client can expand work indefinitely without compensation "As directed" — vague standard creates no objective measure of completion…
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Kimi K2 0905: Dish “Mid-Winter Aurora” A transient bite of the polar night: spruce-ash cured scallop, sea-urchin & white-chocolate snow, black-garlic parsnip “soil”, pickled pine-bud glass, spruce-wood smoke encapsulated in a hot caramel sphere that melts tableside to release the aroma of a burning yule log while the sauce—fermented…
Mistral Large 4: AURORA A Concerto in Five Movements: The Life Cycle of a Single Scallop Conceptual Narrative This dish tells the story of a Pecten maximus — the great scallop — from its ocean birthplace to the plate, through five distinct temperature and texture states.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Kimi K2 0905: This is a fascinating counterfactual. If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947, the technological, economic, and geopolitical landscape of the 20th century would have been dramatically altered. Let's trace the implications through 1980, focusing on second- and third-order effects. 1.
Mistral Large 4: This is a fascinating counterfactual. Let me work through this systematically, tracing the ripple effects. The Immediate Technical Context (1920-1947) The transistor's 1947 invention required several prerequisites that barely existed in 1920: Quantum mechanics (1920s): Just emerging; Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac…
12+ more head-to-head results. Free. Not a trick.
Free account. No card required. By continuing, you agree to Rival's Terms and Privacy policy
Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Mistral Large 4 has the edge: newer, bigger context window.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.6/M tokens | $0.68/M tokens |
| Output price | $2.5/M tokens | $2.09/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 524K tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $6.00 | $6.80 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 6 Oct 2026.
Kimi K2 0905 is developed by Moonshot AI while Mistral Large 4 is developed by Mistral AI. Kimi K2 0905 has a 262K token context window vs Mistral Large 4's 524K. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Kimi K2 0905 and Mistral Large 4 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.
Kimi K2 0905 costs $0.6/M input tokens and Mistral Large 4 costs $0.68/M input tokens. Kimi K2 0905 is $0.08/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Kimi K2 0905 and Mistral Large 4 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.