Kimi K3 is now live

685 points - today at 2:46 PM

Source

Comments

dovin today at 7:42 PM
Just in case you were thinking of signing up directly with Moonshot to use the service, they appear to train even on API use:

> We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, support, and improve the Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and policies, and keep the Services safe and secure. Customer who requires restrictions on the use of Customer Content for training or improving Moonshot AI models may contact Moonshot AI to discuss available enterprise arrangements or separate written agreements. Unless otherwise expressly agreed in writing, Customer Content may be used for the foregoing purposes.

https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/agreement/modeluse#4-content

Tiberium today at 3:04 PM
More details:

- https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/guide/kimi-k3-quickstart

- https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/pricing/chat-k3

1M context, pricing is $3/$15 for 1M tokens (cache $0.3), which is extremely high for a Chinese open-weight model, but if it's truly competitive with most of the current frontier and is only behind Fable/Sol, the pricing is justified.

This is 1:1 pricing of Anthropic's Sonnet series (except Sonnet 5 which is currently on discount), and very close to 5.6 Terra pricing (Terra's input is $2.5).

One thing to consider, though: reasoning efficiency matters directly for how expensive a model actually is in real use. GPT's models are extremely reasoning efficient, and some Claude models like Fable at lower effort are as well. So if Sol spends 10K reasoning tokens to do something (at $30/1M) vs Kimi K3 that spends 50K reasoning tokens, Sol would win on cost effectiveness.

ekojs today at 3:23 PM
> In our evaluations, Kimi K3 delivers frontier-level performance. Among the models tested, its overall intelligence ranks second only to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. For the complete benchmark results, see our tech blog. The full model weights of Kimi K3 will be released in the coming days. More details on the architecture, training, and evaluation will be published together with the Kimi K3 technical report.

> K3 pushes the boundary of end-to-end knowledge work. On the GDPval-AA v2 leaderboard, Kimi K3 scores 1687. The benchmark evaluates AI models on real-world tasks across 44 occupations and 9 major industries; Kimi K3 ranks behind only Claude Fable 5 Max and GPT-5.6 Sol Max, and ahead of Claude Opus 4.8 Max at 1600.

> On AA-Briefcase, Kimi K3 scores 1527, ranking second among all models — behind only Claude Fable 5 Max and ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol Max (1495). AA-Briefcase is a private agentic knowledge-work benchmark developed by Artificial Analysis to evaluate frontier agentic capability in long-horizon knowledge work.

Really good benchmark score it seems. Maybe another DeepSeek moment right here.

simonw today at 3:57 PM
Pelican: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... - rendered via the OpenRouter API: https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3

95 input, 16,658 output = 25 cents! https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=95&ot=16658&ic=3&oc=15 (13,241 of those were reasoning tokens.)

I think that's the most expensive pelican I've rendered through a Chinese model so far.

m3h today at 3:43 PM
> Kimi K3 is Kimi’s most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters.

This puts them on the top of the largest open models list:

  Kimi K3            2.8T
  DeepSeek-V4-Pro    1.6T (49B active)
  Kimi K2.6          ~1T (32B active)
  GLM-5.2            754B (40B active)
  DeepSeek-V3.2      685B
  Mistral Large 3    675B
That's one mighty large model! Moonshot is going to need the USD 500 million reportedly raised earlier this year to run this model.
meetpateltech today at 6:59 PM
Kimi K3 blog is up: https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

2.8T param open model, 1M context, native vision. Weights releasing by July 27 with technical report. Launching with max thinking effort by default; low/high effort modes coming in future updates.

bdhtu today at 8:00 PM
@dang, since the English blog post is now live:

https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

Maybe we should update the link to it instead?

InsideOutSanta today at 4:38 PM
On the first try, Kimi K3 just found the source of a bug that Fable 5 hasn't been able to pinpoint in multiple attempts. It's just one anecdote, and I haven't used K3 much yet, but so far it's looking extremely promising.
wolttam today at 3:54 PM
I'm a bit nervous this one isn't going to be open-weights. Any mention of "open" has been struck from the literature for this model (it was present an hour ago). We don't even know active params?

At this pricing, I'll be surprised if it's open.

swimwiththebeat today at 8:06 PM
Did anyone see on the blog post[0] that it was able to code up an entire GPU compiler from scratch? It looks like it even outperformed triton on some GPU kernels. That just seems insane to me.

Wonder if they’ll open-source this and show how many tokens it cost.

[0] https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

h2aichat today at 4:35 PM
Working with chinese models is giving me a fullfilment sensation. I think that I have enough quality for the work that I need to do and lots of extra tokens to work with. With Claude and ChatGPT I reach the limits fairly easy, but not with OpenCode Go. So I will use Claude once in a while for difficult tasks to see how much better it still is (but use Chinese on a daily basis)
sebmellen today at 6:51 PM
My testing prompt for these models is by no means objective or repeatable (like the pelican) but it's a nice test of curiosity:

> Impress me with a 1 page html file

Result: https://ydaurtg3fdwhq.kimi.page/

Came out looking pretty cool! By contrast, Fable produced a moderately more interesting "live observatory" of the solar system.

buildbot today at 3:19 PM
Amazing to see an open source model already nearing the benchmarks of Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol!

Also very cool to see LatentMoE being picked up by more models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18089)

InsideOutSanta today at 7:32 PM
The blog post is now online:

https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

- The blog post is explicitly saying that the model is open; that language was removed from the previously shared link

- It shows benchmarks

I've been playing around with it for the past few hours, and I think it's an amazing model. I'm not sure I could tell the difference between this and Fable in a blind test. The quota in the $100 Kimi Coding plan seems to roughly align with what I get from the $200 Anthropic plan when I primarily use Fable.

XCSme today at 5:43 PM
I finished benchmarking[0] it, but it was not fun, it only supports (max) reasoning and the model is quite slow. Apart from a few requests timing out, it also has some issues with tool calling/response format schemas (Moonshot rejected tools.function.parameters with anyOf schema).

It also, for some reason failed to generate either of the 2 coding demos (hamster svg and solar system css animation).

Intelligence-wise, it's between GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-5.6 Sol. It's ~30% better than Kimi K2.6, but a lot slower and more expensive.

[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/moonshotai-kimi-k3-max/moonshot...

blovescoffee today at 3:10 PM
Excited for the deepseek release this week (or at least they announced they'd release this week). Hopefully they also push even closer to SOTA.
esher today at 3:07 PM
Half kidding feature request for HN: Mark all AI related posts so I can filter them out, when I need a pause.
xyzsparetimexyz today at 3:37 PM
Any updated Pareto frontier graphs? https://paraplouis.github.io/llm-pareto-frontier/ is quite out of date now.
XCSme today at 3:59 PM
Only supporting "max" reasoning is weird, their parameters are quite inflexible atm:

    Important limits:

    reasoning_effort currently supports only max; K3 always has thinking mode enabled.

    max_completion_tokens defaults to 131072 and can be set up to 1048576.

    temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, n=1, presence_penalty=0, and frequency_penalty=0 are fixed; omit them from requests.

    Return the complete assistant message unchanged in multi-turn conversations and tool calls.

    Vision input does not support public image URLs. Use base64 or ms://<file-id>, and make content an array of objects.

    Web search is being updated and is not recommended for production workflows in the near term.
msdz today at 3:16 PM
> We also further increased the sparsity of the Mixture of Experts (MoE): with the Stable LatentMoE framework, the model efficiently activates 16 out of 896 experts. Together with improvements in training methodology and data recipes, these structural advances give K3 roughly 2.5x the overall scaling efficiency of K2, converting compute into capability more effectively.

Assuming experts are uniformly distributed (I’m really not that familiar with the deep details there), that’s 2800/896*16 = 50 billion active parameters just for the active/expert part. Wild stuff, and I’m glad there’s at least some companies still publishing (and pushing, for open-weight models) total parameter count.

And: It sounds very believable that this would result in efficiency gains wrt. to compute necessary for “good”-quality inference. Does anyone know whether there currently even are any SOTA or near-SOTA models that are dense still?

seizethecheese today at 7:18 PM
Kimi doesn't do well on my "ask a trivia question that other AIs get wrong" test.

The question it came up with, "which U.S. state is closest to Africa?" is a pretty standard trivia question without any reason to believe other AIs would get confused. https://pellmell.ai/s/dccdeca69f929f79bc89317035610049

Even GPT-OSS-120b gets this right: https://pellmell.ai/s/1a43dfc7a3baa214aa0fa1b95d2c536a

Gecko4072 today at 4:48 PM
Very interesting to see how Gemini 3.5 Pro stacks up against this new wave of models. Hope they have something similar to a Gemini 3.1 moment soon. Their speciality has always been math and multi modal intelligence and the new models are recently all very coding focused.
pr337h4m today at 3:35 PM
It does seem to have retained the K2 series's creative writing abilities, at least with the prompts I've tested so far.
smalltorch today at 3:24 PM
Account creation with only a phone number or google account is lame.
himata4113 today at 6:08 PM
It's important we now have a recap to the opus 4.8 release where we were threatened with ID verification as "these models become more powerful" and had to pass "verification" to gain full access to the capabilities without having random "cyber" refusals.
modeless today at 6:40 PM
Anthropic's "durable advantage" theory of US AI dominance is looking pretty silly. There's zero indication that it will be hard for China to keep pace as models improve and start contributing to their own training. Which pretty much invalidates their policy recommendations.

They can't even blame it on distillation this time, unless they want to claim that their own preferred security measures were ineffective in preventing Chinese access to Mythos.

deleted today at 6:44 PM
simonw today at 7:12 PM
The technical blog post is out now, and it's a better top-level link than what we have currently: https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3
d3Xt3r today at 7:47 PM
Does anyone know how to connect this (web version) to Microsoft Learn MCP?
GodelNumbering today at 3:15 PM
I've playing around in between with Arc-AGI-3 lately. Based on my very quick test prompt, I do not think it will achieve any meaningful score in Arc AGI 3. Not that it was expected to.
luciana1u today at 7:52 PM
at this rate the next model release will just be a git commit hash and a shrug emoji
schmorptron today at 3:34 PM
That's a more than 2x jump in parameter count. I know it's not a measure of quality by itself, but it will be interesting how it "scales". Bust it looks like they're gonna be competing with the big boys now, pricing also approaches Gpt 5.6 Terra
wxw today at 3:21 PM
Open source Fable/Sol challenger! Interesting to do a release product-first.

https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/guide/kimi-k3-quickstart

HarHarVeryFunny today at 4:25 PM
Why do most LLMs insist on a login, even for a free trial?

I entered a question to try it, but as soon as I hit enter it wants my phone number for a login. No thanks.

grommz today at 6:05 PM
Imagine you're a mid sized company and you can host this model locally. Suddenly there are zero reasons to pay a single red cent to the bloodsucking American AI cartel.
oybng today at 4:49 PM
>Too many people are chatting with Kimi right now. Subscribe to enter a dedicated priority queue!
deleted today at 7:25 PM
ncruces today at 3:49 PM
I get a quota of GitHub Copilot for free.

From all the models available to me I'm most happy with Kimi K2.7 (given the cost/performance).

anthonypasq today at 4:01 PM
Does anyone have any heuristics on how scaling parameter count actually scales cost to serve? Also im assuming we dont really know the sparsity here?

Is them pricing at Sonnet level actually give us any information at all at how big Sonnet is or is there too much opacity around inference margins?

anentropic today at 5:29 PM
Quite impressed by the result to my first prompt...

How feasible is it to hook Kimi up to do GitHub code reviews? the Copilot quotas got really stingy recently

nullbio today at 4:09 PM
This is far too expensive. Why would I use this over a frontier model at these prices.
vblanco today at 7:31 PM
Another deepseek moment? it seems they have fully caught with fable tier of models, and this was a lot sooner than was expected.
npn today at 3:43 PM
Not worth it. I have just tried a single prompt in the web interface and it is still not finish reasoning. It thinks too much and often repeats the same stuff over and over.

Combine with the price it will surely more costly than gpt 5.6.

XCSme today at 4:15 PM
I am trying to benchmark it, but it only supports (max) reasoning, and even for simple questions, it takes forever to answer/times out :(
taf2 today at 5:03 PM
I'm not finding this on huggingface yet is and open model or is kimi now a closed model ?
jdw64 today at 7:35 PM
They're saying kimi3 beat Fable in the AttnRes Kernel Optimization benchmark. What does this benchmark actually mean?
luciana1u today at 4:32 PM
at this rate we'll have a new state-of-the-art model before i finish typing this comment
sudosysgen today at 7:30 PM
https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

"The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026."

deleted today at 3:04 PM
benjiro29 today at 6:28 PM
Full benchmarks in Mandarin:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/V4xhEIy8xDXSMDPrPkmUAQ

Translation:

https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/V4xhEIy8xDXSMDPrPk...

Cheaper then GPT 5.6 Sol (according to their results) ...

antiloper today at 3:31 PM
Seems to only use ≈60% as many reasoning tokens as 2.6. So the price hike is not as bad as it looks.
simianwords today at 7:16 PM
Kimi 3's Artificial Analysis benchmark scores between GPT Sol and Opus 4.8.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models

XCSme today at 3:41 PM
No blog post? Benchmarks?
root-parent today at 5:14 PM
Wants a phone number...no thank you.
tw1984 today at 3:09 PM
> Among the models tested, its overall intelligence ranks second only to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

> The full model weights of Kimi K3 will be released in the coming days. More details on the architecture, training, and evaluation will be published together with the Kimi K3 technical report.

https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/guide/kimi-k3-quickstart

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freestanding today at 5:32 PM
it doesnt work though, text area brings up pop up window
segmondy today at 6:58 PM
Crap, the first open weight model that really feels out of reach when it comes to running it locally at home. :-(
tskj today at 3:41 PM
I'm curious if they're keeping up mostly due to distillation or how that works. Does anyone outside China know?
cute_boi today at 4:11 PM
Thank you Kimi. We no longer need to rely that much on Dario and his supreme lackeys to decide what is safe or not for simple tasks.
khalic today at 3:14 PM
I really need to finish my automated model evaluation harness, I can't keep up with this pace
minraws today at 5:16 PM
The question remains is it open or not, if it's open I will use it if it's not well I was happily being fucked over by an American tech giant...
wellthisisgreat today at 6:44 PM
how much would it cost to host it on AWS for example?
loolhahalmao today at 4:31 PM
do they not have an API? only sub?
satvikpendem today at 3:36 PM
Now, will they actually release the weights? Seems like Chinese model providers are slowly closing up, like Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 which did release weights (but not the biggest parameter count ones) and none for 3.7.
lvl155 today at 3:28 PM
Say what you want about these Chinese models but they sure create competition and urgency in the space.
calburnofsouth today at 3:20 PM
Curious why the thinking mention chatgpt for a moment https://ibb.co/JFdhMN95
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