Kimi K3 Launches with 2.8 Trillion Parameters and the Pelican Benchmark

Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

Moonshot AI just released Kimi K3, their most capable model yet with 2.8 trillion parameters, challenging giants like Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6. I tested it with my famous pelican riding a bicycle prompt, revealing high reasoning costs but excellent vision capabilities. While the pelican test no longer perfectly predicts overall model quality, it remains a valuable 'hello world' exercise to gauge basic geometry, token usage, and whether a model is worth trying.

"The biggest limitation of the pelican is that it doesn't touch at all on the thing that matters most for today's model: agentic tool calling and the ability to operate tools reliably as conversations grow in length."