Moonshot AI Announces Kimi-K3: The World's First Open 3T-Class Model
Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27
I am excited to introduce Kimi-K3, the next generation of open frontier models from Moonshot AI. As the world's first open 3T-class model, it is built on a new architecture featuring Kimi Delta Attention and native agentic capabilities. Designed for long-horizon coding and complex reasoning, Kimi-K3 offers an extended context window for repository-scale understanding. We are releasing open weights directly on Hugging Face, inviting the community to stay in the loop for the upcoming launch.
It is the world's first open 3T-class model, designed for frontier intelligence across long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning.
- NitpickLawyer
This will be interesting for a few reasons. First, depending on where the median pricing settles w/ 3rd party providers will tell us what it costs to serve a 3T model. Since it's going to be mxfp4 native, it'll take ~1.5TB of VRAM to host this, which is juuust at the limit of 8xb200s (but realistically you'll need 16x for context / throughput optimisation). Won't be cheap to host, but at least we should get some range of $/MTok for a 3T model. Then we'll be able to guesstimate if "labs are subsidising tokens on API pricing".
Also interesting to see what effort it will take to fine-tune this beast. The latest AISI benchmarks on cybersec place it above glm5.2, but still way way behind SotA closed models. Some fine-tuning might be needed here. Also, interesting to see if Cursor does another training round on it, to directly compare it w/ kimi2.6/2.7 fine-tunes (composer series) and grok4.5.
Also also, interesting to see if someone takes on distilling (proper distillation, w/ training the entire distribution) from this into smaller models. (dsv4-kimi should be really good, since dsv4 is very cheap to serve)
- MeProtozoan
It is online on https://app.fireworks.ai/models/fireworks/kimi-k3 (Uncached Input $3.00/M Cached Input $0.30/M Output $15.00/M)
- dilliwal
from the license:
If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business,
and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million
US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive
12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI
before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.
- storus
Getting 404 on the OP's link. Does it mean it got banned or self-censored in the meantime?
- KronisLV
I feel like most hardware to run LLMs on is shaped wrong for individuals.
It's either having a model struggling along with like 5-10 tokens per second on unified memory, or data center cards with hundreds of GB of VRAM consuming more than a kW of power. It doesn't seem like there's prosumer GPUs with like 180W-250W TDP and 128 GB or 256 GB of VRAM (one can dream). Then bifurcation and even just two of those cards would be kinda useful (albeit NVLink or equivalent would need to be commonplace).
Obviously nobody is running Kimi K3 locally without an insanely beefy homelab and lots of money to burn, but running GLM 5.2 would be cool at like ~100 tokens per second for a single session and maybe ~60 tokens per second with N subagents.
How unfortunate.
- walrus01
Looks like it's live now, it's approx 17GB per safetensors file x 96 files, so so about 1.63TB. I can only imagine that people with their favorite quantizing tools warmed up and ready to go are aggressively downloading it now.
- gorgmah
We already know that competition brought GLM 5.2 prices down roughly 45% since its release on June 16th (1.5 months ago), and the price downward slope is probably still going (I've been checking regularly and new providers keep fighting on price, I don't think prices have settled yet). For reference : https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.2#providers
I saw arguments like "Providers cannot price less than their costs" in other comments. In economics, it's generally admitted that they shouldn't price less than their marginal costs, i.e. in their case roughly the cost of electricity, since a lot of these datacenters are not at capacity in terms of graphics cards usage (speculation since it's very easy to rent a GC for a couple hours on some providers). My guess is that someone will be selling tokens at less than electricity + depreciation of GCs soon, since there's a lot of competition and "smaller" data centers have overcapacity? This is speculation, correct me if I'm wrong
- jug
In my opinion, next step is to cut down on reasoning tokens while maintaining intelligence. The Chain of Thought and looping can still be an issue with these Chinese models. They in fact said K3 would improve in the area but it's still an issue that unfortunately harms the token cost wins a bit. OpenAI has been really impressive here, on the opposite end of this.
- fahrradflucht
Its now on Nebius: https://tokenfactory.nebius.com/?modals=endpoint-details&mod...
$3.00 / 1M In; $15.00 / 1M Out; 120 Tok/s
But since for reasons only Nebius knows Token Factory in general does not seam to offer prompt caching (at least not discounted) its essentially useless.
- midnightbobarun
K3 releasing as open source right at the same time that people are criticizing Opus for questionable performance (there's even a thread on HN about Opus 5's problems)... this is such a flex.