The Kimi K3 Moment

Regardless of whether they achieved parity via distillation, or whether they got here via independently constructing a model from scratch, it was always going to end this way for the frontier American labs. Distillation “attacks” are not attacks. The frontier labs “distilled” all existing human written knowledge into their models, there was always going to be a second class lab that would distill that model into a cheaper version of it. There was never any plausible explanation for why this wouldn’t happen. There was never any practical mechanism to prevent someone from saving a conversation and using it to train their own model.

Even if it didn’t happen here, it was still the case that it was going to happen going forward. It was always going to end like this. Invest in the hardware companies, not the model companies.

I tried Kimi K3 on a task I've done with every other model I use regularly (https://swelljoe.com/post/i-let-every-agent-implement-its-ow...) and found it chewed a lot longer on the problem and ate up almost the entirety of a 5 hour usage limit on their $19 plan.

I only have the $20 plan from OpenAI and the same task, with a lot of the same implementation details as Kimi Code, only took a few minutes and consumed almost none of the 5 hour limit.

Subscription usage limits are hard to measure as none of the providers tell you directly what it means in terms of tokens or anything else you can easily compare, but when I sat down to add Kimi Code to flar, it was because I wanted to try it on some real work and then couldn't do any, because usage was nearly gone after the trivial task...no other ~$20 subscription I have has felt that tight before.

So, it was really slow to complete the task and seemingly much more expensive than every other model I'd tried. Maybe bad luck. Maybe it'll do better on other tasks. I wouldn't know as I was out of usage when I had time to try.

It did find a bug that Gemini 3.5 Flash introduced unprompted, though, so it has that going for it.

This was always where this was heading, but we got here much faster than expected.

Once western governments declare it to be a "national security" risk for citizens to have access to open-weight frontier models, and once they classify using these models as acts of terrorism, what will that world be like?

Will using Kimi K3 come to be like how napster was in the olden days? Everybody knew it was technically illegal, but come on -- any track at your fingertips? But surveillance is quite more evolved now.

Or it will be like cannabis, where a guy in the neighborhood will low key rent you metered access to the 8x5090 rig in his basement he cobbled together from parts on ebay? Or everyone will flock to VPNs?

Or will the oppressors actually succeed? The same way that napster is long gone, and everyone accepts that they must pay spotify for a homogenized collection, where artists must take only a minuscule cut (more than napster though)... We'll be stuck with nerfed Cohere or Mistral models for open-weight options, as if they need more lobotomizing. Or else we can pay through the nose for Anthropic/OpenAI for "American Frontier" models which will fall increasingly far behind China.

Or else, like how Kindle Fire was subsidized by ads, we'll have "Kindle AI" where influence is sold to the highest bidder, where the LLM will tell us that smoking is actually healthy if big tobacco can engineer its renaissance by turning its lobbying dollars to pay-to-play, pumping its propaganda into the training pipeline for Amazon's extra commercialized line of ultra budget LLMs.

Even in this very thread the feedback on Kimi's actual efficacy is debated. I personally feel its worse than both Fable and 5.6 Sol, but I feel like the conversation isn't really about whether its good or not, but a backlash against the U.S governments foray into regulation. So I think people _want_ it to be superior out of anger/frustration with the current situation.

> I’ve been running Kimi K3 alongside Claude on my normal coding work, and for all practical purposes I can’t tell them apart

When you say "Claude", do you mean Opus? Fable? What effort level?

I think it's the opposite.

Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters. We don't know the number of parameters of ChatGPT 5.6 or Opus 4.8, but it's probably in the same region. Fable/Mythos are rumored to be around 10 trillion.

So, K3 is directly comparable with ChatGPT 5.6 and Opus 4.8, and the price is not so much lower:

K3: $3/$15 per 1 Mtok input/output ChatGPT 5.6 Sol: $5/$30 Opus 4.8: $5/$25

This is not a watershed moment. It's a competitor converging to the same capability and trying to undercut your prices, but not by a lot.

As for the open weights? For now, Kimi K3's weights are closed, and I don't expect the situation would change.

Well, there is the small issue of privacy policy: Kimi will train their models on your interactions if you use their subscriptions, and only with direct API usage (billed at API prices) they say they won't. Whether you trust that is another matter.

Those things do make a difference to some of us, even though nothing is black and white. In my case, I'll probably want to wait until other providers appear through OpenRouter and then I'll try to judge how much I trust them. But even if I don't trust them much, they don't train models anyway, so the likelihood of my data being used that way is smaller.

The current administration's immigration policy isn't helping. This wouldn't have happened 10 years ago because the US was this city on the hill that everyone wanted to immigrate to. Talented Asian researchers would have immigrated to the US and China would be deprived of talent.

It was all distillation up to this point anyway. And I agree with what Suhail said on twitter: "Make the margins next to zero for all these AI models. It was trained on humanity's data, it should be gift to ourselves. Doing so will save us from a few in control of our species."

Kimi K3 is really good, but it’s obviously worse than Fable, usually worse than Opus, in my experience.

I think the biggest problem with Chinese models is that they seems to overthink for most of the tasks, especially for smaller ones. The OpenAI models have in my experience only gotten better in terms of efficiency.

We're having so many moments! Every day a new moment.

Claude is not reliable anymore with their sudden Fable access drops etc tbh and I am happy there are good alternatives coming out

Terms of use are very broad and not friendly for most things.

Can’t use for commercial purposes. Can’t opt out of training. Data retained.

GPT 5.6 Sol comes out ahead of Kimi K3 on price/task (but not significantly so). You're probably thinking, "Why use Kimi K3? Isn't an open model supposed to beat the closed one on price?", but you need to consider that the closed models are completely hobbled when trying to do anything security-related. For my use-case, I can't risk getting pwned because I'm using a model that refuses to secure my app while there is now an open model that obliges to obliterate any app that isn't protected.

I can see the economics of open vs. frontier models turning out similarly to pharmaceuticals, where generic drugs cost a fraction what the name brands do and Americans end up paying the highest prices in the world partly as a consequence of propping up drug discovery research.

If Kim was "distilled" from Claude, how much were the token costs, assuming Kim got everything it can out of Claude?

A lot of these open source models do look good on public benchmark but not sure if they are that trustworthy with production workloads.

Is anyone using open source models for anything major ?

I never truly understood what the intended business model around LLMs was. Get them widespread through cheap pricing and then jacking it up? Being the only ones that had a viable product so to get the ability to extract as much value as you want from AI?

I don't understand how a product that:

- is interfaced with and is deeply linked to natural language, so everything you produce (sessions, history, etc) is in Markdown and you can literally install a second model and tell it "hey import all of Claude's memory into yours" and that's it

- is based on well understood technology, the real constraints are how much money you put into training the models, but the theory has all been developed in the open

- clearly has a threshold where it quickly commoditises and turns from "I want the best" to "hey the best is a bit too expensive. The second best is half the price and works close enough".

was ever supposed to be a money printing machine. The fact something is extremely useful doesn't imply it's extremely profitable.

IMHO we're clearly speedrunning the process of turning AI into a commodity. Dario Amodei knows pretty well that when or if Anthropic cuts people off Fable, the vast majority of them will definitely not pay for it because Opus 4.8 is good enough for almost everybody that _knows_ what they're doing, and so are basically half of the most recent models. If I already have good baking skills I don't become more productive with an automatic bread machine, I just need a better dough mixer and oven

Has anyone tried Kimi K3 against gpt-5.6-sol on real projects?

Half-OT: can anyone recommend a LLM cost calculator that's up to date?

20 years ago we used to pay a lot for things that are now practically free. I don't think AI is an exception.

> I think I can see where this goes. The government will try to regulate AI and open source in particular, and it will run the playbook it ran for the auto industry. Decades of subsidies, bailouts, and protective tariffs produced American carmakers that sell trucks at home and barely register anywhere else in the world.

Here's the thing about this though, the auto industry directly employed hundreds of thousands of people.

The AI labs are small, only few benefit directly from their wealth and there's already immense opposition to AI, data centers, etc...

USA GOVT. BE LIKE: BAN ALL CHINESE LLM

But damn Moonshot.

In my experience GLM 5.2 is a pretty good Opus replacement. But K3 has not given me an experience on par with Sol or Fable. The price/intelligence ratio might still make sense. But it’s not very inspiring when it comes to my real world tasks. I’m doing pretty mundane web stuff.

Related:

Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935342

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48947717

Its worthwhile to have a quote from the article as some comment without reading:

"...I’ve been running Kimi K3 alongside Claude on my normal coding work, and for all practical purposes I can’t tell them apart. Same tasks, same quality of output, and near identical token counts to get there. I expected an open model to be sloppier or to grind through more tokens on the way to the same answer, and neither turned out to be true.

The prices are nowhere near each other. K3’s API runs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output. Claude’s top model costs $10 and $50 for the same units. The subscription side is even more lopsided..."

The dumb efforts by the US AI industry to use fear mongering for regulatory capture will hand dominance to China and others.

In a few years there will be Mythos level open weight models hosted by the lowest bidder anyway.

Was this written by Kimi K3 or Fable?

> The prices are nowhere near each other. K3’s API runs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output. Claude’s top model costs $10 and $50 for the same units.

And this is the point where your internal compiler should have started shouting 'Type Error'

Notice the trick here?

> Then there’s the fine print. Claude couldn’t sustain Fable access on the twenty dollar plan, so they turned it off, and the plan quietly falls back to Opus.

Where is the Fable-class Kimi model at all?

[dead]

Try asking Kimi about Tianenmen square...