Kimi K3-256k

This was posted 38 minutes ago, and as of 20 minutes ago, several Anthropic services are now designated as having a "major outage".

Doubt these are related, but it made me laugh a little.

This seems functionally similar to OpenAI having a step in pricing once you exceed a certain context length (also at 272k aka 2^18 aka 256k).

Having a lot of active context increases the per-token cost (flops issued and bytes read per token out) so it makes sense to pass that cost on to users. I'm actually surprised it's implemented as a hard cutoff instead of a smooth gradient.

That's actually nice! I usually try to stay below 200k context anyway.

This is just an API level change right? The model itself should be the same I think.

This isn't quantized, right? Just a smaller context?

Why are Anthropic and OpenAI even allowing their coding harness apps to be plugged into different model providers…? I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to clamp down on that by now.

> k3-256k is now available. Within 256k context, it delivers the same results. k3 (1M) consumes about twice as much quota as k3-256k.

Since Claude is the first time for me really, really out (TIL against my wished about https://status.claude.com/), I am now interested enough to see what else works. But ... when I click pricing, I see "Join a waitlist". Wtf? Are they really that good, so were totally surprised and overwhelmed by the requests, is this a marketing stunt, or do they just don't have the hardware being in china?

What is the purpose of this? Just a hard cutoff below the actual context window? You could set that in your harness anyway.

I can't seem to find pricing for this model. Since the context size is just a quarter of the full size K3, is the price also much cheaper?

I usually keep my context in chats below 256k anyways so this would be tremendous honestly.

A bit of topic. But how likely is it that the US will restrict Chinese open weight models and also force Euro countries to do the same? I think it will be effective within 6 months. The US is having a hard time staying competitive.

omg! new model!!

The bells tolled today, but nobody came to church.