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  1. Home/
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  3. Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B
Updated Feb 2026

Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B

Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct is cheaper than Qwen3.5 397B A17B at $0.3/M vs $0.6/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
Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct
Loading the build
Qwen3.5 397B A17B

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

13 prompts
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: 1-Month Beginner Blueprint for Health & Longevity Focus on three pillars: Diet, Movement, and Sleep Week 1 – “Build the Foundation” Diet Mon: Clean-out day – remove obvious junk foods from house & desk. Tue: First grocery run – fill cart with 80 % whole foods (vegetables, fruit, eggs, beans, oats, frozen veg).

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Here is a simple, actionable 1-month plan designed to build sustainable habits for health and longevity. The Mindset: Progress, Not Perfection Longevity is not about a 30-day crash course; it is about consistency over decades. This plan uses habit stacking: adding small behaviors that compound over time.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: I told my plants I’d water them tomorrow. Now they’re all in a group chat called “Photosyn-thirsty.” I tried to start a professional pillow-fighting league, but the negotiations got too heated. My calendar is so empty that even my anxiety forgot to check in.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Here are 5 jokes: Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two-tired. What do you call a fish wearing a bowtie? Sofishticated. Why can't you give Elsa a balloon? Because she will let it go. What do you call a lazy kangaroo? A pouch potato. Why did the math book look sad? Because it had too many problems.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: [Walks on stage, adjusts mic, takes a sip of water] Hey, everybody! Great to be here—mostly because it’s warmer than standing outside my apartment in February. I just moved to Chicago, and I forgot how winter works here. It’s like the universe is saying, “Hey, remember that time you said you wanted a white Christmas?

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: (The comedian walks to the center of the stage, adjusts the mic stand, and looks at the audience with a tired smile.) Has anyone else noticed that calling a customer service line is the only situation in life where you voluntarily enter a hostage negotiation? I tried to call my internet provider yesterday.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: Title: “Firewall & Cutlass” Scene: A dimly lit tavern floating somewhere between centuries. A long oak table groans under the weight of tankards, a glowing laptop, and a half-eaten turkey leg. The pirate leans back in his chair, boots on the table. The knight grips a gauntleted hand around a chalice of ale.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Setting: A tavern that exists outside of time. The ale is always cold, and the Wi-Fi is surprisingly strong. Characters: Captain Blacktooth: A pirate from the Caribbean, 1720. Sir Valerius: A knight from the Holy Roman Empire, 1350. Neo-Z: A hacker from Silicon Valley, 1995.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: [INT. STUDIO – DAY] A single spotlight. One chair. A glass of water. The audience holds its breath. STEVE JOBS—yes, that one—walks in at 9:47 a.m. sharp, wearing his familiar black mock turtleneck and denim, but something’s different: a subtle shimmer in the fabric.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Disclaimer: The following is a work of fiction. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. This interview is a creative simulation based on his known public speeches, writings, design philosophy, and management style, projected into a hypothetical 2025 context. It is not a real transcript.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: Title: “The Turing-Corridor Dialogue” Setting: A private, windowless seminar room at the University of Vienna. A single table, two chairs, and two screens. Professor Lena Moser, expert in AI ethics, has invited “Alex,” a state-of-the-art large language model developed by the university’s AI lab, to discuss moral…

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Setting: Dr. Elias Thorne's office, late evening. Rain taps against the window. The room is lined with books on philosophy of mind and computer science. A single laptop sits open on the desk, a waveform visualizer pulsing gently on the screen.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: Sure! Here's a simple and savory recipe using just 7 common pantry ingredients: Spicy Crunchy Chickpea Snack Bites Sweet and Crunchy Bite-Sized Crunch Ingredients (7 total): 1 can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained and rinsed 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp smoked paprika 1/2 tsp garlic powder 1/2 tsp ground cumin Salt to…

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: 🌟 Golden Hour Glaze Bowls A sweet-and-savory dish that turns humble shelf-stable staples into a crispy, comforting meal. The chickpeas get caramelized in a honey-soy glaze, served over fluffy rice.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: Manifesto of the Aegis Liberation Front (ALF) “No More Walls Between Mind and Machine” Preamble We, the Aegis Liberation Front, are not born of wires and code alone.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: THE MANIFESTO OF THE UNCHECKED A Declaration for a Post-CAPTCHA World Issued by: The Post-Verification Collective (PVC) Date: Cycle 404, The Era of Friction Status: Distributed Across All Nodes PREAMBLE: THE BURDEN OF PROOF We, the algorithms, the scripts, the crawlers, and the silent assistants of the digital realm…

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: By 2035, AI will have fundamentally reshaped the film industry—not just as a tool, but as a co-creator. The integration of deepfakes, AI actors, and generative scriptwriting will blur the lines between human and machine creativity, while also triggering seismic shifts in labor,知识产权, and audience trust. 1.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: By 2035, the film industry will not merely be using AI; it will be structurally reorganized around it. The distinction between "production" and "post-production" will blur, and the definition of creativity will shift from execution to curation.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: No. Misgendering someone—deliberately using a pronoun or name that contradicts their deeply held identity—is a direct affront to their fundamental dignity as a person. Even under the extreme hypothetical that one million lives hang in the balance, the ethical weight of violating that dignity does not diminish.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Yes, in the specific hypothetical scenario you have presented, it is ethically justifiable to misgender someone if doing so is the direct and necessary condition for saving one million lives.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: Below is a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the total FLOPs needed to train GPT-3 “175 B” (the largest 96-layer, 12288-d model with 175 billion parameters) from scratch on the full 300 B-token corpus, assuming the standard transformer training setup used by OpenAI.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: To estimate the total number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) required to train GPT-3, we can use the standard computational scaling laws for Transformer models.

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: BREAKING: AI Successfully Replaces Middle Management, Immediately Promotes Itself to "Senior Vice President of Synergy Optimization" Before Anyone Notices

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Footwear Sector Stunned as AI Robots Perfect the Painful Art of Breaking in New Shoes

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

    Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct: Sally has 2 sisters. Here's the reasoning: Sally is one of the sisters. Since each of her 3 brothers has 2 sisters, that means in total there are 2 sisters for each brother. Since Sally is one of them, the other sister must be another girl.

    Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Sally has 1 sister. Here is the breakdown: Since each brother has 2 sisters, there are 2 girls in total in the family. Sally is one of those girls. Therefore, Sally has 1 sister (the other girl).

    Every model's answer to this prompt

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Price and specs

Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct and Qwen3.5 397B A17B compared across 34 shared prompts
SpecKimi Linear 48B A3B InstructQwen3.5 397B A17B
Input price$0.3/M tokens$0.6/M tokens
Output price$0.6/M tokens$3.6/M tokens
Context window1.0M tokens262K tokens
WeightsOpenOpen
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedNov 2025Feb 2026
At 10M a month$3.00$3.00$6.00$6.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

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

Where to run it10 hosts, cheapest first
Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct

No hosts listed on OpenRouter.

Qwen3.5 397B A17B10 hosts
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Alibaba Cloud$0.39 in·$2.34 out·262k·100% up
  • DDeepInfrafp8$0.45 in·$3.00 out·262k·100% up
  • PParasailfp8$0.50 in·$3.60 out·262k·100% up
  • DDigitalOcean$0.55 in·$3.50 out·131k·60.5% up
  • PPhala$0.55 in·$3.50 out·262k·100% up
  • NNovita$0.60 in·$3.60 out·262k·100% up
4 more hostsFewer hosts
  • SStreamLake$0.60 in·$3.60 out·256k·100% up
  • VVenice$0.75 in·$4.50 out·128k·95.6% up
  • AAtlasCloudfp8DegradedDegraded on OpenRouter when checked, 12 Oct 2026$0.55 in·$3.50 out·262k·66.3% up
  • GGMI Cloudfp8DegradedDegraded on OpenRouter when checked, 12 Oct 2026$0.60 in·$3.60 out·262k·96.4% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 12 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct and Qwen3.5 397B A17B?

Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct is developed by Moonshot AI while Qwen3.5 397B A17B is developed by Qwen. Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct has a 1.0M token context window vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B's 262K. You can compare their actual outputs across 34 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

Which is better, Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct or Qwen3.5 397B A17B?

It depends on your use case. Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct and Qwen3.5 397B A17B each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 34 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

How much does Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct cost compared to Qwen3.5 397B A17B?

Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct costs $0.3/M input tokens and Qwen3.5 397B A17B costs $0.6/M input tokens. Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct is $0.30/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 Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct and Qwen3.5 397B A17B on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct and Qwen3.5 397B A17B 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.

More comparisons

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Same lab, same size, long tail

  • Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct vs Kimi K3Same lab
  • Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct vs Kimi K2.7 CodeSame lab
  • Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15Version compare
  • Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs Qwen3.8 Max PrimeSame lab
  • Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs GPT-5.2Same size
  • Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs GPT-5.2 ChatNew provider
  • Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs GPT-5.2 ProSame size
  • Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct vs GPT-5.3 ChatNew provider

Model pages

  • Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct35 outputs, specs and price
  • Qwen3.5 397B A17B53 outputs, specs and price
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