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Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by NitpickLawyer on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:37AM (#49065868)
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)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vb-8448 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:16AM (#49066568)
> Then we'll be able to guesstimate if "labs are subsidising tokens on API pricing".

No, you don't. Without training cost you can infer only the marginal cost of serving this kind of models.

Moreover, you don't know the actual size of closed models (what if Fable is a 10T model? What if it's 1T?)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by lelanthran on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:22AM (#49067937)
> No, you don't. Without training cost you can infer only the marginal cost of serving this kind of models.

Still useful; "are the labs marginally profitable just on the marginal inference costs?" is still a useful question to answer. After all, if they aren't even profitable on inference in isolation, then we can expect to see large price increases.

If they are able to turn a marginal profit on inference alone, then perhaps the price increases won't be so severe (or perhaps they expand the time between generations so that they spend less on training but take longer to complete training).

"Are the labs profitable at all?" is, of course, a much more useful question, but that doesn't mean that the first question is completely useless.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vb-8448 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:12AM (#49068514)
I wasn't saying it isn't useful, I was saying that you cannot infer even the marginal cost of closed models.

The K3 maths can turn true only if the models size is roughly the same and the labs didn't find any better way to run inference at scale.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by solenoid0937 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:01AM (#49068361)
We know labs make money on inference, and we know they lose a lot of money on inference+training.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by lelanthran on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:12AM (#49068511)
> We know labs make money on inference

We don't really know that, for OpenAI and Anthropic. We suspect that, but as far as I know, even they have stopped claiming that they are profitable on inference.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by anthonypasq on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:15AM (#49070035)
unless you think that Opus is 10T+ params, its pretty much impossible for inference not to be profitable when doing some basic napkin math on other open models, and if Kimi K3 is 3T params with the same performance as Opus then that means that China is actually way more technologically advanced than the American labs.

So which is it?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vb-8448 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:05AM (#49068423)
Just out of curiosity, based on what we know for sure they(OAI+A) make money on pure inference and lose on inference+training?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nl on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:36AM (#49068786)
OpenAI's financials leaked and showed this pretty convincingly.

Anthropic was probably profitable last quarter, without training costs: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by amelius on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:21AM (#49066599)
> Without training cost you can infer only the marginal cost of serving this kind of models.

Which is by far the most interesting number of the two.

> Moreover, you don't know the actual size of closed models (what if Fable is a 10T model? What if it's 1T?)

If you get close in output quality, then does that matter?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:43AM (#49066753)
> If you get close in output quality, then does that matter?

When you're trying to estimate/infer the costs of serving the tokens and even include the cost of training the weights in order to output tokens then yeah, why wouldn't that matter?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jvuygbbkuurx on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:21AM (#49067025)
That only matters if you are an investor not if you are a consumer.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by solenoid0937 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:01AM (#49068371)
Consumers want better models too, of course it matters
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:12AM (#49067405)
Well, or if you're participating in a discussion on HN where the sub-topic happens to be "if labs are subsidising tokens on API pricing" and literally the cost of serving the tokens is relevant to the sub-topic people are trying to discuss...
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vb-8448 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:51AM (#49067241)
> Which is by far the most interesting number of the two.

Only if you don't have to continuously train new models, and you are not at a runway risk.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by NitpickLawyer on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:21AM (#49067465)
Training cost is directly impacted by inference cost nowadays. Most of the gains come from RL these days, and that is highly dependant on inference (~7:1 inference:training in units of compute). That's mainly because you want many roll-outs for each training scenario.

Of course inference efficiency is dictated by model architecture, size, etc. You can still guesstimate some of those and have an idea about cost/serve at several size tiers.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jeremyjh on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:36AM (#49067578)
That isn't really relevant to GP's point. We still don't know what training costs because we don't know how much RL is done.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by energy123 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:42AM (#49067183)
Gross margins are insanely important, possibly the most important single metric if for some reason you were forced to choose one.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vb-8448 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:24AM (#49067493)
Only if you assume that at some point, for any reason, there will be "the model" that doesn't need costly retraining.

I guess this is one of the reason Anthropic i so "active" for asking for a development break.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:35AM (#49069525)
"I want my competitors to stop competing" is an interesting ask for someone who's currently charging the highest prices in the entire industry.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by criley2 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:41AM (#49067614)
>No, you don't. Without training cost you can infer only the marginal cost of serving this kind of models.

Are you talking about Kimi's training cost or the training cost of the model(s) that Kimi distilled?

Because Moonshot didn't even incur the majority of the training costs either

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tiagod on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:03AM (#49067770)
I believe they are talking about the closed models' training costs.

I other words, the providers that will be offering K3 inference don't have any training costs to offset, so they are only charging for the inference itself. OAI/Anthropic would need to offset their R&D and training costs in order to not be selling API access at a loss.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nl on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:39AM (#49068825)
> the training cost of the model(s) that Kimi distilled?

The distillation process involves getting conversation traces from the model you are distilling from, and then training your model against them.

You still have to do the training!

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by woctordho on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:45AM (#49066303)
Speaking of finetune, currently a common practice is LoRA over bnb 4-bit base model, but I think it's time to replace bnb with GGUF as the base model format. GGUF is actively supporting new model architectures and more aggressive quantizations.

I've made some proof of concept in https://github.com/woct0rdho/transformers5-qwen3.5-recipe . We can finetune Qwen3.5-35B-A3B in 16 GiB VRAM, and DeepSeek-V4-Flash (284B-A13B) in 90 GiB VRAM, without CPU offload. This works well on unified memory machines like Strix Halo.

Even so, larger models like Kimi-K3 still require multiple GPUs and nodes, and there are a lot more to do compare to single-GPU training.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by maxignol on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:16AM (#49067434)
I dont quite understand why GGUF is better optimized. Are the performances better for the same amount of VRAM ?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by woctordho on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:59AM (#49070663)
GGUF is at least better than bnb. From what I know, bnb does not yet find a way to quantize MoE with enough accuracy, and maintain the dequant-MoE kernels. In the age of Qwen 3.0, people tried to make some bnb '4-bit' quants of MoE models, but actually the MoE part is not quantized. It's a pity that even Unsloth gave up low-VRAM finetuning with MoE (although they're making their GGUFs for inference), and the world of local training looks stagnated for months.

GGUF is maintained by all the llama.cpp developers. There are many quantization formats and algorithms under this container format, some are optimized for MoE (such as APEX quant), some for CPU and some for GPU, some work surprisingly well below 4-bit (and even near 1-bit). It also supports recent architectures like linear attentions and mHC.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by qeternity on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:21AM (#49068619)
I cannot be sure what the likes of Cursor have done, but I think it's incredibly unlikely that they have trained a QLoRA for Composer.

It's almost certainly full parameter post training of the original model weights.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dist-epoch on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:42AM (#49066270)
> if "labs are subsidising tokens on API pricing"

> SemiAnalysis estimates that Anthropic's current blended gross margin has risen to the mid-60% range, with the API business gross margin exceeding 80%

Of course, people will insist "they are lying", "why should we believe them, it's well known they subsidize API pricing", ...

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-...

https://finance.biggo.com/news/02d45650-b569-4d12-b44d-8d6d8...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by NitpickLawyer on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:45AM (#49066301)
Agreed. My (somewhat educated) guess is that top labs have healthy margins on API pricing. But this release will add another 3rd party / clear of conflict datapoint in this estimation.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by knollimar on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:07AM (#49066501)
That numner blends in training or no?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by npn on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:56AM (#49066845)
even deepseek, with their current (dirt cheap) price, can earn enough profit to cover the cost (hardware investment?) in 10 months.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by likium on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:37AM (#49069556)
Will the model even be competitive in 10 months though? Seems like models that reach top 20 on OpenRouter see 50% of all token spend by day 80, and 80% by day 180.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by entrope on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:49PM (#49072324)
As long as the hardware can be used on newer models, hardware costs can be recouped running a future model.

But if they're hoping to recoup non-recurring engineering costs rather than just hardware costs, they do need to consider the useful lifetime of the specific model.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:18AM (#49066583)
It will be very interesting to see what kind of 'slow' performance people get from running it on a no GPU, but tons of RAM server (like a dual or quad socket xeon with 1.5 to 3TB of RAM). For the purpose of giving it longer duration tasks to generate a piece of something and come back and check on what it has done in 4 or 6 hours. Even if the output is like 5-6 tok/s, that might be usable for some purposes.

Huge price difference in what you can do with buying a used 4U rackmount server and putting 3TB of RAM in it (64GB DIMMs x quantity 32 in a quad socket xeon, you can see some benchmark prices on eBay for sets of 16 or 32 matched 64GB ECC DIMMs) for <$30,000, vs the cost of trying to run it on real GPU hardware.

Now obviously, as of the time I write this, the full precision hasn't been released nor has anyone like unsloth run it through quantization yet to produce a "Q8" or "Q8-XL" variant of it. But I think it's going to need more than 1536GB of RAM, with a usable and large amount of context, more like 2TB and preferably 2.5 to 3TB.

I also predict that people who try to run it in Q4 and Q6 will get the worst of both worlds, less precision/lost knowledge but also not reliable output that comes out too slow. In my personal opinion if I'm going to deal with something that is smart but slow and running on limited budget hardware, I need it to be Q8.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fooker on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:36AM (#49066701)
> Even if the output is like 5-6 tok/s, that might be usable for some purposes.

You'll spend ~100x more on electricity than the API cost to have it run on someone else's GPU at several hundred tokens per second.

I think some sort of extreme data privacy requirement is the only situation that justifies this, but the intersection of {needs absolute data privacy, needs to run SOTA model, cannot afford GPUs} is really really narrow. I wouldn't be surprised if this is an empty set.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:38AM (#49066711)
There are a number of use cases where sending the contents of your context and prompts (and the resulting output) to a 3rd party service is off the table as an option, and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty. And not everyone's electricity is equally expensive, I pay about $0.075 USD per kWh. It would for example cost me about $48 a month of electricity (not counting cost of cooling) to run a quad socket Dell R940 for a month.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fooker on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:51AM (#49066811)
Great, so the other member of the set matters for you more than cost.

Do you actually need to run the state of art model at 5 tokens per second instead of a qwen or whatever 7b or 30b model at 100 tokens per second?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:57AM (#49066851)
Do I really need to? No, not really. The 27B full density, 35B MoE, 70B and 122B models I have in use get me 95% of the way there on a lot of things. Particularly when dealing with languages and systems where I have at least an intermediate level of knowledge on, to know whether something is going down a dead end, using a wrong method, metaphorically chasing its tail, or is producing valid output.

On the other hand, would it be cool to also have a really big thing as an ancillary tool that I could throw a request into opencode before going to bed, let it crank away and take a look at what it's done 7 hours later? Yeah, particularly if I (very much an unknown quantity at this time) could be confident that it builds high quality, syntax valid, appropriately commented and not absurd code.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sm-silversight on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:10AM (#49069200)
>Do you actually need to run the state of art model at 5 tokens per second instead of a qwen or whatever 7b or 30b model at 100 tokens per second?

Some people like doing things they want to do. Do I actually need to buy expensive pigments from europe to make paintings of flowers? My camera produces a much more accurate representation.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:16AM (#49069290)
Very good description of it. It does seem like a bit of a rhetorical question to ask a forum that has a very high population of Linux and BSD users why they might desire to have the option to do something themselves rather than relying on an external packaged ready to go product.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by irishcoffee on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:32AM (#49071085)
The whole mentality of thinking one knows better than another about what they need causes infinitely more problems than it solves.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by light_hue_1 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:51AM (#49067246)
As someone who has worked in two industries that are at the maximal end of data sensitivity and privacy this comes across as a tinfoil hat issue not a real business requirement. In such cases we've always found ways to trade dollars for the privacy we need without having to run our own inference at excruciating slow speeds.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:56AM (#49067278)
Do you mean by trading dollars for the privacy you need as:

a) Contracting with a third-party independent inference provider who will run your choice of model on fast hardware that they own, with all appropriate data security/privacy/contractual/compliance protection in place

or

b) Contracting with the original creators of the model to run inference via their API and with assurances that all the same data protection is in place

or

c) Spending the money to buy your own inference hardware to run it on something you fully own/control at proper usable speeds?

Edit: Everything I've been writing in this thread is mostly within the context of being able to evaluate K3 and its usefulness to be self-hosted as a preliminary proof of concept or test of feasibility of a new thing, such as on <$20,000 of server hardware, before proceeding to spend 300-400k on GPU-related hardware, or external third party services/ongoing billing.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jmalicki on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:47AM (#49068186)
A) is very doable with e.g. Amazon Bedrock.

They'll give you HIPAA compliance, they even have a data center for US government classified data, they can give you European data sovereignty. And with OpenAI and Anthropic models to boot, you don't even have to settle for open weights.

What kind of privacy needs do you really have beyond that?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:50AM (#49068222)
It is not my use case but given recent political developments in international relations caused by the executive branch of the US government, off the top of my head, I could think of a lot of European or Canadian firms for which that would not be an option. No matter what they might promise about European sovereignty. For a good 'ol patriotic US domestic company? Sure.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Taunt4 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:55AM (#49069025)
Yes, its the US cloud act risk EU companies run up against on hyperscalers like MS/AWS.

Even for EU companies running open weights on EU stacks LLM inference on the GPU must process plaintext and I can't find any EU provider with NVIDIA H100/H200/Blackwell CC mode plus SEV-SNP or TDX, where you can cryptographically verify the workload ran somewhere the operator cannot inspect.

Personal compute is therefore the only option if you want personal autonomy privacy for IP &c. Maybe another option is to use cloud compute rented to fine tune a personal model that suits your own needs that would help bring the cost down, I don't know enough about this area to know if it kills the "intelligence" of those domains due to limited ?cross-verification within the LLM.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by well_ackshually on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:28PM (#49072880)
>very doable with <US company>

for anyone not US-based, this company is hostile and you have to assume the US government can and will force them to give access to your data.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by SoftTalker on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:29PM (#49074510)
It's also worth considering what you are actually paying for. And it's not keeping the data private, it's taking the blame when there is a breach. Same reason companies hire big consulting firms whenever they need to make an important but possibly risky decision.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by solarengineer on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:24AM (#49067491)
There are regulated sectors in countries where data sovereignty is important enough that the sector sticks to air-gapped on-prem hardware and does not use cloud services at all. They have the dollars to pay for more than what it would cost to run on the Cloud.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by frognumber on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:16AM (#49067887)
Having worked in / adjacent several such industries, a lot of the question depends on scale.

A trillion-dollar business can easily trade dollars for the privacy. A business with $1M to spend won't even get a phone call with OpenAI or Anthropic, who were the only* previous players in town for doing this.

Worst-case example: Bootstrapped startup working in military.

It's also the case that an open model enables many more intermediate-cost solutions. E.g. providers certified for specific applications, on-prem rentals, etc.

* Omitting Azure, which gives some privacy for some $$$ on their models, but not at the level of high-security.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by amluto on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:35AM (#49068066)
> Omitting Azure, which gives some privacy for some $$$ on their models, but not at the level of high-security.

If I were ranking third parties on their ability to safely handle my data without compromising it, I would rank Anthropic pretty low for things like Fable (where they more or less promise that they will misuse my data), but I want Azure pretty low in the sense that I fully expect them to be compromised.

I would tend to trust Amazon to avoid being compromised.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by frognumber on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:43PM (#49075266)
At least for regulated applications I worked on, no one cared.

The provider needs to comply with specific rules, have specific certifications, and sign specific agreements. You check the boxes, and you're good to go.

Microsoft does that better than anyone. OpenAI and Anthropic don't do that at all. Google does that rarely and poorly. AWS is not bad, but not as good as Microsoft.

Azure was always my go-to for regulated applications in the cloud. Some do require e.g. on-prem or even air gap, where even Azure is out.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fc417fc802 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:46PM (#49075304)
The expectation that one BigTech company has a competent security team while the other doesn't seems entirely baseless?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ClumsyPilot on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:22PM (#49075686)
There are situations where you don’t care about government spying but care about random criminals And there are situations that are the opposite
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by amluto on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @05:46AM (#49081557)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jmalicki on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:28PM (#49071950)
> Worst-case example: Bootstrapped startup working in military.

That's the easiest case.

AWS Bedrock models running in AWS Secret Cloud for Industry. (I really have no affiliation with them, I'm just like... this is a completely solved problem, why do people think this is hard and requires on-prem hardware?)

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-secret-cloud-for-in...

I'm with GP that these are tinfoil hat concerns, when there are solutions to all of these, unless you're perhaps in some country with very specific needs beyond things like European sovereignty or US military secrets (like a non-US defense concern).

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:33PM (#49072049)
You seem to be categorizing everything that considers their data being in the possession of the US an unacceptable risk to be tinfoil hat, which is kind of an insult to a large portion of the world. If you haven't been paying attention to the news in the last 48 months, the political reality has shifted considerably.

Note that the other commenter never said US-based military oriented startup. You just assumed, then jumped to "heck yeah let's use Amazon Secret Cloud for Industry"

Not everyone has or wants an office in Crystal City.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Sanzig on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:59PM (#49076657)
I am in Canada. I cannot legally host defence workloads in the United States, even if I wanted to (I most certainly don't).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:28AM (#49069442)
Interesting. So nobody would have had a problem with you running stuff on Chinese AI providers?

I have some inference I simply don't want to run on OAI, Anthropic, or Google because I don't want to run afoul of their "rules" and end up with a banned account, and this situation is only getting worse when it comes to doing fairly basic tasks like trying to secure your app against security problems.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mdasen on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:08AM (#49069946)
That's an unusually low electric rate for the US - way below the lowest state average which is Idaho at 12.4 cents. It's certainly possible that you are getting 7.5 cents including delivery, but I've had friends say that they're "getting 13 cents per kWh" here in Massachusetts, but that's just the supply rate and the delivery is another ~18 cents.

There are parts of states like Grant County Washington that have cheap hydro power, but it's very rare for power to be that cheap in the US. Even if this applies to you, it won't apply to the vast majority of people on here who will have electric rates 2-4x higher.

Average electric rates by region:

    New England            28.1 cents
    Mid Atlantic           25.1 cents
    East North Central     20.8 cents
    West North Central     14.8 cents
    South Atlantic         16.1 cents
    East South Central     15.5 cents
    Mountain               14.6 cents
    Pacific Contiguous     26.1 cents
    Pacific Noncontiguous  42.1 cents
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by AgentMatt on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:32AM (#49070287)
They are most likely not based in the US, but converting to USD to make comparison easier.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:42AM (#49070430)
I am not in Quebec but Quebec hydro rate D for standard residential would be one example of around what I pay.

https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...

Another example would be Manitoba hydro

All figures in Canadian currency

https://www.hydro.mb.ca/account/rates/residential/

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by brailsafe on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:41AM (#49071203)
Specifying USD is indeed often a service usually offered by people born elsewhere for people born elsewhere. Americans seem rarely know about these mysterious places, where bills can come in all sorts of funny sizes and colours. (kind of joking)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rootusrootus on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:39PM (#49072133)
A lot of people quoting low rates are also just referring to their off-peak rate. This is pretty common in EV discussions. It's not exactly a fair argument there, either, because the flip side of having an off-peak rate is that the on-peak rate is usually quite a lot higher. So the true effective rate is a bit higher, somewhere in the middle depending on usage pattern.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by searealist on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:04PM (#49072544)
It's easy to have your EV only charge off-peak, though. It's just a setting.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rootusrootus on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:21PM (#49072776)
My point is that the tradeoff to get off-peak pricing is that on-peak is way, way more expensive. So you can charge the EV off-peak to maximize the savings, but everything else you do during on-peak time costs way more.

Using myself as an example:

I adjust my A/C to run outside of 5pm-9pm (peak) if at all possible, we try to avoid pointless high-draw usage during that same window, and both of our EVs hold off charging until after 9pm.

My rate from 5pm-9pm is 0.43/kWh. My rate after 9pm is 0.09/kWh. The flat rate alternative, if I did not want to worry about time of day, would be 0.21/kWh. These prices are all-in, including transmission and distribution/whatever.

It would be dishonest to say that my EVs only cost me 0.09/kWh to operate, which on it's face is a claim to paying over 50% less. In reality, time of day pricing typically saves me somewhere between 10% and 15% in an average month compared with flat rate.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mindslight on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:22PM (#49073621)
If you leave the EV charging out of your consumption, does a time of day plan still save you money on the remaining usage? Or does it cost you? If it saves you money, then it would make sense to be on a ToD plan regardless of EV charging. Which means it makes sense to consider your additional EV draw as costing the marginal off-peak rate. Essentially the EV load has the valuable property of being dispatchable.

You can do the same thought experiment with say a dehumidifier in your basement. It can easily be off during peak usage and still accomplish its job, so its cost of electricity is also the marginal off-peak rate.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rootusrootus on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:36PM (#49075192)
> If you leave the EV charging out of your consumption, does a time of day plan still save you money on the remaining usage? Or does it cost you?

It would cost me more (modestly so, less than 10%) to be on TOD without the EVs. This will vary by customer, of course, and I expect that the power company designs TOD to be a wash for the average customer. They even guarantee it won't be more than 10% more expensive over the first year or they will refund the difference.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mindslight on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:37PM (#49075840)
Then yes I'd agree with you, it doesn't make sense to describe your EV charging as costing $0.09/kWh since you're presumably only on the slightly more expensive ToD plan due to the EV.

Personally I'd love to have a ToD plan, especially with the rate structure you've laid out - break even seems to be using less than 1/3 of your daily electricity usage during the on-peak hours, which is only 1/6 of the day? I've got a bunch of fixed loads (computers) plus ones that tend to run overnight anyway (dishwasher, dryer, etc).

FWIW I'd think the pricing of the ToD plan versus the fixed rate plan has more to do with how the power company themselves has to buy power and model/hedge against demand at various parts of the day, rather than simply trying to make the costs even for the consumer.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rootusrootus on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:07PM (#49076095)
> FWIW I'd think the pricing of the ToD plan versus the fixed rate plan has more to do with how the power company themselves has to buy power and model/hedge against demand at various parts of the day, rather than simply trying to make the costs even for the consumer.

I agree, my single point of evidence to support my theory is that the power company advertises the TOD plan by presenting an average customer with their breakdown of usage throughout a typical day, and then itemizes how it would look with flat-rate versus TOD. The resulting figure is within a few pennies. I figure that is not accidental, but I could be wrong and it is entirely coincidence.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mindslight on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @10:17AM (#49097876)
They might just not want to encourage people to switch too hard, lest people blindly sign up for it thinking big savings, their bills spike up, and the poco gets a huge customer service problem. Instead they show just a few pennies savings, and lure only the proactive type of people whose start thinking "... and I could save even more by adjusting my usage" ? Just a thought.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by searealist on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:39PM (#49073049)
Fair point.

I guess it depends on if you would be using ToU otherwise.

It looks like about 50% of Californians use ToU plans, but the number is only 10% nation-wide.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by murderfs on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:18PM (#49072723)
> Pacific Contiguous 26.1 cents

This is a bit misleading, because it's combining the 50 cents/kWh from California with 15ish cents/kWh in Oregon and Washington. Seattle City Light, for example, charges 13.38 cents/kWh on flat rate pricing, and far less with time-of-use billing (8 cents/kWh on off-peak).

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by radium3d on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:28PM (#49072858)
If you run off solar with battery backup, you can achieve lower than those rates! Look at Time of Use rates. The super off peak rates instantly become the max price point once you pair TOU with Solar + battery.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nightski on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:34PM (#49073816)
Not the parent, but here is one location that has rates in that range in the U.S.

https://casscountyelectric.com/rates

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zdragnar on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:02PM (#49074198)
I'm actually getting 11 cents in winter, 13 in summer, but my utility company is a co-op. Average for my state is I think 19 cents.

I think you can get down to around 8 if you are signed up for an interruptible load, or a dedicated off peak load, depending on the company, but yeah, standard rates aren't that low.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by flutas on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:14PM (#49074978)
I'm in Arkansas and get rates fairly similar as quoted.

From my last bill

> KWH USAGE 2590 - $183.37

There's a base customer cost of $18 on top of that, but yeah ~$0.077/kWh taxes included.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mambru on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:35PM (#49075180)
Is that for a month or a year?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by seafoam on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:10PM (#49075578)
My monthly bills are similar to this, near Arkansas.

Last one was $212 for 2,146 kwh between June 8 - July 6 (28 Days)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hdgvhicv on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:54PM (#49075978)
76kWh a day, does that include a lot of EV mileage?!
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by flutas on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:02PM (#49076042)
For me at least, yes but it's not an EV specific rate plan just our general one.

~80mi a day + AC is the vast majority of my use (for why so much AC - it's 102f [39c] and feels like 115f [46c] right now as I type this).

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by peterleiser on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:26PM (#49075726)
Nashville Electric Service rates are 12.0 cents / kWh. Flat rate, no peak or off peak rates for residential.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bravoetch on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:57PM (#49075998)
Fort Collins, CO is probably where that rate is. I don't know of anywhere cheaper for residential electric.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bloggie on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:32PM (#49076328)
I pay a little less than that though I’m limited to 50 kW average load. Delivery is a fixed monthly fee, about $10 USD/month.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tda on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @03:02AM (#49080351)
To me (EU) that seems like a pretty generous limit. A normal house connection here is limited to 8kW single phase or 17kW for a 3 phase connection. You can get more, but that is very uncommon and gets expensive quickly
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nextaccountic on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:37PM (#49079014)
> That's an unusually low electric rate for the US

What about buying your own solar panels and batteries?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ljlolel on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:51AM (#49070528)
can send safely context if there’s confidential computing ala my site https://trustedrouter.com/
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by skinfaxi on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:28AM (#49071040)
How do you prove you are running exclusively on Nitro enclave instances or GCP confidential spaces?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Cider9986 on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:31PM (#49072008)
Is your local compute airgapped?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:16PM (#49073521)
My local compute is used by me, and I'm accountable to myself whether or not is secure. So to a certain degree, I trust myself and also know what limitations / potential vulnerabilities it might have.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by well_ackshually on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:26PM (#49072841)
I trust my local compute quite a bit more than a random project that has "trusted" in its name.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by whs on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:45PM (#49074670)
Seems clear from their website?

1. Their API server provide an attestation JWT. This JWT is signed by Google's private key. 2. The attestation has details on the running container. I suppose the container host is a Google-provided distro and Google's signer will verify that the OS is theirs and up-to-date. 3. They could've proxy the attestation. To prove this is not the case, the field eat_nonce include the TLS certificate fingerprint, which should match the API server you're connecting to. I suppose you will need to pull their container and verify from the source that the container itself generate the private key, it never leaves the container, and the container has no way to run arbitrary code such as SSH or vulnerabilities.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tiahura on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:06PM (#49071589)
There are a number of use cases where sending the contents of your context and prompts (and the resulting output) to a 3rd party service is off the table as an option, and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty.

Are there? At the highest levels of defense and law, AWS and Azure are used.

Having tried selling some of these entities on doing things in-house, there seems to be little interest.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:41PM (#49072183)
> Are there? At the highest levels of defense and law, AWS and Azure are used.

This is certainly true if the user is an American company. You could look at the European initiatives to run this stuff on hardware they own in facilities they own and control within the borders of Europe for a counter-example.

Such as: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=schwarz+s...

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/04/government-turns-to-german-...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jmalicki on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:56PM (#49073276)
Yeah, true European cloud providers for these kinds of things seem to be behind, and a lot of the ones offering data compliance at the level of AWS are small enough that it's a bit harder to trust they'll be around and will keep their promises.

Hopefully that changes!

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by doctorpangloss on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:12PM (#49072659)
It's completely academic. At 5tok/s you can process 13 MTok per month at concurrency 1. I use 5 BILLION tokens per week when coding.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:18PM (#49073550)
Yeah. At 5 tok/second, you're talking about around $195 worth of output tokens per month. There is no way I can run a usable K3 model for $195 a month of capex, opex, or any-kind-of-ex.

Qwen 3.6 is another matter. Paying provider rates for the amount I run locally would put me in the thousands of dollars. So that's very practical to buy a Macbook instead, plus an RTX card, and so on.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by polycancel on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:27PM (#49074482)
>and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty

People should always compromise speed for data sovereignty! Who said: that in this digital day and age, information about money is more important than money!

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ComputerGuru on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:56PM (#49075415)
> I pay about $0.075 USD per kWh

Around here electricity companies quote prices like yours but that is supply only while transmission, taxes, and fees are again as much on top. Is that really all inclusive?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pizza234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:26PM (#49075735)
Which are those use cases, considering that the hypothetical server, as described by the GP, is also extremely slow (4/6 hours for a response)?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cobbzilla on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:14AM (#49067865)
I’ve priced it out: max $135/month to run a dual Xeon 2U server with 3T RAM & 2x 22 core Xeon Gold. It’s the 2x 750W power supplies that ultimately determine opex. My power costs $0.124/kWh, the $135 assumes drawing maximum power continuously, and in that case, I can probably offset my heating bill a little bit in the winter, so maybe effectively a little bit lower.

I don’t know if that’s 100x more than I’d pay (opex-wise) with an nvidia setup, but I can say the one-time capex is a great deal cheaper. Avoiding VRAM and DDR5 (fast DDR4 should be OK) are the biggest cost savers. ECC RAM is worth the extra price. General datacenter-quality hardware has less price sensitivity, and plenty of bang for your buck.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:23AM (#49067950)
Keep in mind that just because it has dual 750W power supplies that doesn't mean it's what its load will be, for a full CPU loaded wattage figure you'd need basically a pair of kill-a-watts plugged in inline on the feed for each poewr supply and then run stress-ng with artificial cpu stress on all cores for an hour.

Under heavy inference load you will find that the cpu usage is actually less as the bottleneck is the RAM bus speed. An older 2U rack server that is 600W load (typically a 1+1 power supply server when plugged into two kill-a-watt would show 300W on each, equal load balancing) when maxed out with stress-ng might be only 450W total running inference.

If you have 600kWh used in a month by running something 24x7 and your power is $0.15 a kWh, that's more like $90/mo (not counting cooling or any ancillary costs for the environment where it's in).

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sebmellen on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:19AM (#49067916)
(Context: Parent comment was edited after I wrote this comment)

Where in the world are you finding that much RAM in a racked server for $200/month?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:20AM (#49067922)
I think he means electrical bill at his estimated wattage load of the server and his known kWh cost, not rented server/hosting cost.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sebmellen on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:46AM (#49068172)
Aha, right. That makes a lot more sense.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cobbzilla on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:21AM (#49067930)
At my house. I have 5Gbps fiber and could pay for 10 or 25 if I need it.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sebmellen on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:46AM (#49068175)
Gotcha. But to be clear, you’re talking only about energy usage, correct?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cobbzilla on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:30AM (#49068726)
Yes, what other opex is there? It will have good ventilation, I’m not worried about cooling.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sebmellen on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:47PM (#49077808)
I thought you were talking about renting a dedicated server from a hosting provider, not racking it yourself. My bad!
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:30AM (#49069468)
If you actually were running this thing at 80% or 100% load, then the first thing you'd want to is get a better PDU and then connect your servers to that (48V DC).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:50PM (#49072330)
One of the problems in buying used/refurb x86-64 rack servers for test and development/proof of concept environment, is that by volume in the market, there's not that many -48VDC power supplies going around, because maybe 5-10% of enterprise customers buy them. Resulting in many fewer units ending up on the resale market.

The options for AC power supplies for servers with 2 or 4 load sharing redundant power supplies are a lot greater. If you were buying all new hardware and starting from a clean sheet of paper design with lots of money to spend, absolutely. At that point also start looking at higher voltage DC distribution stuff related to open compute platform and 800VDC.

But if I were trying to make the absolute most use of $20,000 to put together a 3TB RAM server (48 x 64GB DIMMs), it would likely end up AC powered.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Kirby64 on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @02:11PM (#49087759)
Why? Standard server grade PSUs are 80 Plus Platinum, exceeding 95% efficiency. The whole server is designed around 12V, especially for older gear, and replacing it with components that are 48V would be wildly expensive relative to the efficiency benefits.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by btown on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:05AM (#49070727)
One aspect of this is cyberattack proliferation by way of "Hey boss, I saw this TikTok that says if you let me invest [a tiny piece of the neighborhood's profit|our militia's budget] into some RAM, I could get a fully autonomous cyber operation up and running that pays for itself via ransomware etc. within weeks. You like it, we upgrade to something that can work even faster. We don't need the hacker guy from Swordfish with fifty monitors, we just need my cousin who likes building gaming PCs."

That's a world that I don't think we're ready for.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by 9x39 on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:18AM (#49070905)
A similar world is already here.

Young men 14-?? already compromise and attempt to extort organizations daily, sometimes cluelessly from western nations, often not. It doesn’t have to be gangs when the home country doesn’t care / isn’t technologically or culturally developed.

Already seeing AI-written payloads and frameworks in the wild. I think it’ll turn out that AI won’t build you a maintainable ERP but it can create C2 networks, exploit POCs or even 0-days potentially, and let kids make their own ransomware tooling. Then we’re dealing not with a handful of cybercrime tool makers but a generational problem.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tripzilch on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @05:08AM (#49081278)
> that justifies this

this is hacker news sir

we don't do things because they are easy ... or because they are justified ...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tripzilch on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @05:19AM (#49081362)
> extreme data privacy requirement

so I have a a few decades worth of creative coding projects, many personal notes + writing, pictures, video clips, renders, projects, backups of the previous laptop's home folder that contains the laptop before it in the ~/dump folder and so on, spread out over several harddisks, laptops and storage media

it's a mess that I've wanted to organize for years, but I can't seem to manage it

but I might be able to sketch out a plan or task for a local multi-modal LLM to slowly chug through all the files (read-only), catalog and index them, copy to a clean external SSD, de-dupe and tidy everything up

I mean, some of this data is already highly personal, and there might be stuff I forgot was there

... is it an "extreme data privacy requirement" to not want to share running an LLM for this task, and wanna do it locally?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:41AM (#49066738)
I dunno, K3 thinks a lot before it actually replies, and you might be in the ~1 tok/speed region or even "seconds / tokens", and with K3, you'd wait days if not weeks for a reply in that case.

Don't get me wrong, slow is sometimes better than "not at all", but depending on the performance, it might end up way too slow to even work for batched/async jobs like that.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:44AM (#49066758)
I agree it's very likely to be painfully slow, I very much want to see some real world results from people who try it. Early testers will inform others on whether it's even worth trying. Results very much TBD right now. I don't have a system sitting around here with 2TB of greater of RAM that isn't already committed for other uses, regretfully.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:53AM (#49066824)
Lets say an easy response takes 32k tokens in total, and to be generous, let's say it does 1 tok/s. This is already ~9 hours, and 32k reasoning tokens isn't even that much and as mentioned, K3 probably does the longest/most reasoning/thinking out of the available open weights models today, much like GLM. Just lowering that performance to 0.5 tok/s, would lead to ~18 hours for a simple prompt to receive an answer.

And then that's just for single prompts, what about agent harnesses, where before every tool call the model could reason a bunch?

I agree with you that real world results would be interesting, but I wouldn't hold my breath nor expect it to realistically be able to be useful. Still, people should try it, for science if nothing else :)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by justincormack on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:58AM (#49068316)
You can rent one in the cloud to try it
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by johndough on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:11AM (#49067398)
> But I think it's going to need more than 1536GB of RAM, with a usable and large amount of context, more like 2TB and preferably 2.5 to 3TB.

The model is known to be MXFP4 according to Kimi's release blog post, so the model weights will be less than 1536GB: https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3

Also, their previous models were native INT4, so it would be weird if they went larger now.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by johndough on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:22AM (#49070973)
Update: Looks like the model is larger after all (1561.44 GB). Only the MoE weights are MXFP4, while the other weights are BF16 (and a few FP32).

* Sparse Experts: 1481.4 GB

* Dense Experts: 1.9 GB

* Self-Attention: 72.4 GB

* LLM Head: 2.4 GB

* Embeddings: 2.4 GB

* Vision Encoder: 0.35 GB (surprisingly small)

plus some miscellaneous parameters.

Most importantly, we now know that the model has 104B active parameters, which is quite a lot.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by magicalhippo on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:56AM (#49066844)
> running it on a no GPU, but tons of RAM server

Or from SSD using something like Colibri[1]. Not going to be quick, but at least runable.

[1]: https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:01AM (#49066877)
It's a great concept but I think it would cross the line from 'very slow' to 'so slow it's unusable' at this size. Even if we say you have an NVME SSD that does 7GB/s reads, that's dramatically slower than being able to hold the whole thing in DRAM. Like the difference between 1.3 tok/s in RAM vs 0.1 tok/s with a colibri-like method.

edit: the results I have seen from people trying colibri with fast consumer grade PCI-E 4.0 NVME SSD are 0.1 tok/s on models that are <700B in size, things that are well under 800GB on disk. With something that's 3T in size it'll probably be a lot slower than hat.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:07AM (#49067813)
For single stream inference of a MoE model, the size of active sparse parameters will matter a lot more than total parameters. This is generally around half of the reported active parameter count - the other half being a dense subset that can be easily cached in VRAM even on fairly modest consumer setups. So the achievable performance may be quite a bit better than a naïve assessment might suggest.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by LtdJorge on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:16AM (#49067883)
On a server machine you can have more than 100GB/s of NVMe if you parallelize (RAID 0 and the like). But it's still gonna be noticeably slower.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:41AM (#49068110)
1536GB of DDR4 ECC server RAM is somewhere between $4000-6000 USD used right now, by the time you put in parallel enough NVME SSD to approach good speeds, you'd be approaching that (and also likely running out of PCI-E bus lanes directly attached to the same motherboard to reasonably do so).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by magicalhippo on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:51AM (#49067242)
It claims to support using multiple devices RAID-0 style, which should boost performance, but yea probably not very useful for most.

But still fun you can run it at home.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ElectricalUnion on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:49PM (#49074717)
Won't the answer (even for a pretty basic message like "hi") at SSD speeds take like a _entire week_ to _start showing useful output?_ (attempting to do 22k average claude code system prompt + 32k thinking tokens thru 0.1t/s throughput)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Havoc on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:18AM (#49067911)
> Even if the output is like 5-6 tok/s

On a 3T model I’d imagine you’d be closer to 0.05 tks

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by amluto on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:37AM (#49068088)
Presumably it’s MoE and only needs to read a small fraction of the weights per token. Bonus points if you can get decent speculative decoding without becoming ALU-limited.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:20AM (#49068604)
Speculative decoding is not really worthwhile for sparsely-loaded models. You end up paying in both memory bandwith and compute (loading experts based on wrongly-predicted tokens) which leaves you worse off overall. It becomes viable (even for sparse MoE) once you're batching so widely that you end up having to load most of your total weights anyway.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by amluto on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:39AM (#49069574)
> Speculative decoding is not really worthwhile for sparsely-loaded models.

If wonder if you can train a model to optimize this, by trying to make the expert selection sticky across a few tokens, without too much quality loss.

Another fun idea might be to try to build a model where the router chooses the expert 1-3 tokens in advance.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by johndough on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:12PM (#49071681)
> If wonder if you can train a model to optimize this, by trying to make the expert selection sticky across a few tokens

You can!

> AFM 3 Core Advanced makes routing decisions per prompt. A lightweight, dense block selects a fixed set of experts during initial processing, periodically reselecting them during generation.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-third...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sandworm101 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:21AM (#49066602)
Those old LTT videos of high core-count threadrippers running GPU benchmarks become more relevant each day.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:26AM (#49066632)
The performance bottleneck is not really so much the number of cores or processing power in each core, but the memory bus bandwidth to/from the CPU. I have an older dual socket xeon server here which is a CPU-only LLM test machine with 256GB of RAM and the actual CPU stress is not much, I can even quantify this by how little it spins up the CPU fans to meet thermal load (the CPUs are operating at nowhere near their 180W per socket max capacity, compared to like, crunching prime numbers or running cpuburn).

But the memory bus speed is fully committed when generating tokens or thinking.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sandworm101 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:03AM (#49068389)
Thats where the threadrippers really excelled. They had the lanes for memmory access. We might soon see the return of dinner plate-sized CPUs with thousands of pins.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:55AM (#49069753)
The epyc Venice SP7 socket is apparently 9324 pins

https://x.com/tomshardware/status/2066846693778510331

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sandworm101 on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:35AM (#49070329)
We are going to need a bigger boat.

https://www.cerebras.ai/

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by barbacoa on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:38AM (#49069566)
They are saying that AMD's new Epyc Venice CPU has 16 memory channels allowing up to 1.6Tb/s of bandwidth. Which is higher bandwidth than most non-HBM GPUs.

So full CPU local AI inference may become viable option in coming years.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by lallysingh on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:01AM (#49070673)
This is essentially guaranteed. There are lots of useful smaller models that we should be able to run locally. Over time they'll be more and more capable and require less API usage.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by calgoo on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:48PM (#49072298)
Im wondering if we are finally seeing the end of the "hard disk" era, and are entering a new era of vast instant on systems.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by adgjlsfhk1 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:14PM (#49074976)
the GPU competition is using 16 gpus, so the actual comparison is that the CPU has <1/10th the bandwidth
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by flockonus on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:36PM (#49072993)
As you already went through the thought exercise of laying all this RAM over various slots, then match against the right CPU (which also you'll need multiple) - it becomes clear quite fast that it's trying to mimic the architecture of a GPU except in extremely low fidelity and bandwidth @ a higher energy cost.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by holoduke on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:39PM (#49075226)
It will be not 5 tok/sec. More like 0.5 tok per sec with a fast cpu setup.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by woadwarrior01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:33AM (#49066687)
Since the model is natively MXFP4, I think it'll be even more interesting on the hardware front. It'll comfortably fit on a 8x AMD MI355X node. I suspect that'll drive token prices down, further.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Der_Einzige on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:35AM (#49066695)
Anyone who thinks that the labs are not profitable on per token API pricing is delusional and hilariously wrong.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by flaburgan on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:53AM (#49066825)
It all depends if you count the fixed cost of training or not. And the cost of the hardware.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by flyinglizard on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:13AM (#49066973)
Or even the basis of the cost of hardware. There are lease deals, capacity traded for equity, various programs by Nvidia, there's absolutely massive depreciation, etc.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Der_Einzige on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:58AM (#49071457)
Depreciation is massively overrated by Micheal Berry and his ilk.

Everyone keeps thinking those A100s only have 6 more months of life, and yet they're still going for more than they did per hour in 2024.

Show me evidence that A100 prices have collapsed, and maybe GPU depreciation will be relevant to the market.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rhdunn on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:00AM (#49066872)
If it is a mixture of experts (MoE) model like the 2.x models, won't this reduce the hardware needed to run the model?

The Kimi-K2.6 model is 1.1T parameters with 32B active parameters. With light quantization (Q6_K) that's enough to run it (slowly) on a single 5090. On a single B200 you can have 5-6 experts loaded into VRAM at a time. Realistically that would be 3-4 to account for the context. [!]

[!] With this and other MoE models it looks like an interesting area for research would be to detect or predict which models would be needed ahead of time. That way you could schedule the load into VRAM step before the weights are needed. That way you shouldn't lose much/any performance from offloading the weights to RAM.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:07AM (#49066931)
> The Kimi-K2.6 model is 1.1T parameters with 32B active parameters. With light quantization (Q6_K) that's enough to run it (slowly) on a single 5090

Without leveraging system RAM and/or SSDs, I don't think you can, or how exactly are you running this, if this is something you are doing today? With CPU/expert offloading you could probably do it with a 5090 + 1TB of RAM or something like that, but absolutely not on a single 5090 entirely within VRAM.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by robotswantdata on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:44AM (#49067191)
Yes hybrid approaches are much better than people realise.

There are a lot of optimisations that are not in the public sphere, source working on start up in this space

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:08AM (#49067373)
> There are a lot of optimisations that are not in the public sphere

Sure, but if we're participating in public discussions, isn't it more fun if we talk about things people can actually read and understand, rather than secret stuff other's can say work, but no can actually validate or know how it works?

It sounds like "hybrid approaches are much better than the public is aware, because everything else is private and secret", but also: ok, so what? No one can run that anyways, (yet?), so why it matters?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rhdunn on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:32AM (#49067114)
Yes, that's what I was saying w.r.t. expert offloading, i.e. ensuring that the GPU could fit the active parameters not all the parameters.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:10AM (#49067389)
Alright, I guess I misunderstood. To be fair, this part:

> The Kimi-K2.6 model is 1.1T parameters with 32B active parameters. With light quantization (Q6_K) that's enough to run it (slowly) on a single 5090.

Is painting a very different perspective, even considering the latter parts it's hard to read that as "Of course offloading everything else that doesn't fit on the GPU itself". But anyways, it's been clarified now so no harm :)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:08AM (#49066944)
I assume you mean putting only the 32B active parameters on the GPU, and the rest on a bunch of regular server DRAM like on a 768GB to 1024GB RAM server?

Because Kimi K2.6 in Q4 is about 584GB GGUF size on disk and will use slightly more than that in RAM, Q8 is 595GB.

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Kimi-K2.6-GGUF

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by petu on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:06AM (#49067358)
You need whole weights in VRAM for optimal performance. Don't be confused by "experts" in the name -- you don't get to load static subset of experts and blast next 100 tokens with them. In typical MoE model they get switched "randomly" on every token, so all experts have to be readily available.

> With light quantization (Q6_K) that's enough to run it (slowly) on a single 5090. Kimi K2.6 is released as INT4 already.

So 5090 with K2.6 is just gonna sit idle 99% of the time, waiting for next slice of weights to load.

5.6 Sol calculates that single 5090 in raw compute & memory bandwidth can run K2.6 at 35 t/s (256k context depth) -- if it somehow had enough memory to hold whole model in VRAM. Man, I hope HBF succeeds and Nvidia brings it to consumer cards in 5 years..

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:32AM (#49067547)
> In typical MoE model they get switched "randomly" on every token, so all experts have to be readily available.

It's worse than that: a typical MoE model routes a separate set of experts at every layer, not just every token! But in practice, RAM offload (for systems with non-unified VRAM) and even SSD offload still work surprisingly well given some amount of caching.

You can likely recover compute intensity and throughput by batching requests together, which (in practice, depending on sparsity) will end up reusing some of the loaded experts with high probability; though the obvious tradeoff is that having to store KV caches for the wider batches may leave you with less room to cache experts across layers and tokens.

(Plus if you're batching so widely that you end up loading essentially entire model layers, MTP then becomes applicable even for a MoE model. But this typically only applies if you're doing inference on a very large scale, or if your memory bandwidth is so scarce that you have to recover compute intensity by any means feasible.)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by searealist on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:13PM (#49072678)
> It's worse than that: a typical MoE model routes a separate set of experts at every layer, not just every token! But in practice, RAM offload (for systems with non-unified VRAM) and even SSD offload still work surprisingly well given some amount of caching.

Caching really has nothing to do with this. With RAM offload you can mostly benefit from:

1) Batching for prefill is a huge win, even with MoE, since the batch sizes can be so large.

2) Keeping non-expert weights in VRAM, so the percentage of weights used per token in VRAM is higher. This benefit reduces with larger models, though.

> You can likely recover compute intensity and throughput by batching requests together, which (in practice, depending on sparsity) will end up reusing some of the loaded experts with high probability;

With MoE it's low probability.

> MTP then becomes applicable even for a MoE model

With MTP it becomes _extremely_ low probability.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:51PM (#49073208)
> With MoE it's low probability.

For even the sparsest MoE open models, having more than a handful of inferences in the batch is enough to make it more likely than not that you'll get some MoE weight reuse within any given layer. This assumes totally random sampling, ignoring any cross-request correlation that would push that probability even higher in many practical scenarios.

> With MTP it becomes _extremely_ low probability.

This is actually right, MTP is only ever worthwhile in very special cases involving either dense models or extremely wide batching of MoE ones that somehow still leaves unused room for parallelization (which AIUI would involve an assumption of very abundant compute with very limited memory bandwidth).

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by searealist on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:52PM (#49074065)
> For even the sparsest MoE open models, having more than a handful of inferences in the batch is enough to make it more likely than not that you'll get some MoE weight reuse within any given layer. This assumes totally random sampling, ignoring any cross-request correlation that would push that probability even higher in many practical scenarios.

If you tell me the model and the number of parallel streams, I will do the math.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by NitpickLawyer on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:17AM (#49066999)
You're talking about running this "at home" for 1 user, using a mix of VRAM and RAM (total should be ~1.5TB). That's certainly possible. It'll be slow, especially prompt processing, but doable for single users.

But my comment on running it was more towards serving this profitably at scale. You get much better throughput / unit of compute if you load everything in VRAM and serve many requests at the same time. That's how all inference providers are doing it.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rhdunn on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:38AM (#49067154)
I was talking about running this on a server, hence my comments re 1xB200. Obviously, the more hardware/VRAM you have the better/faster you can run these large models. But if you are a small/medium sized company you could feasibly do it on just one B200. It all depends on how much hardware you can afford to run.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vorticalbox on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:22AM (#49067035)
I think cursor will likely do a grok fine tune rather than a kimi one for the next composer.

they noted in their blog post they didn't focus purely on coding for grok 4.5.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by NitpickLawyer on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:53AM (#49067256)
Most likely, since they were acquired. But for us outsiders it would be a cool thing, to see if the delta is the same between kimi2.x + cursor data -> kimi3 + cursor data.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by swingboy on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:27AM (#49067070)
Say a single Kimi K3 is deployed on 16 x B200s: how many concurrent users can that handle? I realize the question assumes a major simplification that everyone's prompts/sessions are the same.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by serf on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:45AM (#49069629)
>I realize the question assumes a major simplification that everyone's prompts/sessions are the same.

well, exactly.

that's tough to answer without just average sampling because some users will ask the model "what's todays date" or "what color is the sky?" and some users will ask "Let's rewrite the linux kernel in brainfuck."

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Pxtl on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:10PM (#49074297)
So maybe the better question would be how many concurrent actively-thinking/working agents it could handle?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by aae42 on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @09:18AM (#49083403)
In my admittedly little experience running a tiny LLM service on a single 5090 for friends, I would guess a fair bit. It depends on how many tok/sec you're targeting and how much memory you're allowing be used for context (and their context). Definitely more than 1, MAYBE an order of magnitude.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by withinboredom on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:49AM (#49067223)
We have a lossless compression codec (working on open sourcing it over the next couple of weeks) that reduces it down to its minimum entropy -- it cannot be compressed further. On all tested large models, it's a ratio of 1.34-1.23 -- and smaller models up to 3.76x. It also increases the effective bandwidth by the same rate.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by xscott on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:56AM (#49067720)
Exploring compression algorithms for weights is a good idea, and I hope you have a successful product. However, if you can prove this statement:

> reduces it down to its minimum entropy -- it cannot be compressed further.

I think you could make a lot more money elsewhere :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Formal_p...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by withinboredom on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:40AM (#49069579)
We're not an AI company ... nor do we have any reason to use it. Just a fun idea that was fruitful.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by withinboredom on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:06PM (#49073390)
And to clarify -- it only applies to models, not arbitrary data. So its useful to exactly zero other fields.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Alpha3031 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:35AM (#49067567)
That's very interesting. Does that mean you can reduce say, a 30B class Q8 from ~30 GB down to 10 GB or less?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by withinboredom on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:20AM (#49069338)
704gb -> 564gb; 358 gb -> 270 gb; 28.79 gb -> 7.65 gb; 439 gb -> 93 gb

It depends on the total entropy of the model. Smaller models have less entropy.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by johndough on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:39PM (#49072137)
> Smaller models have less entropy.

Interesting. Why is that? I would have expected the opposite, since larger models have to try less hard to fit the training data. Or maybe this leaves more parameters with random initialization, resulting in higher entropy for larger models?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by withinboredom on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:56PM (#49073263)
I honestly don't know... I didn't train the models, so I can't tell why the math works out that way. It just does. I suspect it has to do with the fact that all the small models I've tested have been quantized. I don't know of any small model trained from scratch. If you know of any, I'd be happy to encode it and see what it looks like.
[dead]
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by withinboredom on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:53AM (#49067258)
Thanks for your opinion
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by CamperBob2 on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:18PM (#49071774)
We have a lossless compression codec (working on open sourcing it over the next couple of weeks) that reduces it down to its minimum entropy

LOL

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by blks on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:53AM (#49067252)
If it takes so much resource to run, how does the sharing of a single llm works? There is some interface that basically submits context/cache plus current promt, from each user, doing basically time-sharing compute?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mnahkies on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:58AM (#49067303)
I believe they batch requests so the same weights in vram are shared across many requests https://www.baseten.co/blog/continuous-vs-dynamic-batching-f...
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Palmik on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:00AM (#49068354)
You're assuming inference providers are going to sell tokens at cost. You're also assuming that the inference providers have will optimized inference engine. I haven't seen that to be the case so far, to be honest.

Take a look at GLM 5 vs GLM 5.2 pricing -- GLM 5.2 cost more despite being the same model.

Take a look a look at DeepSeek, which hosts DS v4, profitably, yet others aren't able or willing to match the price.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nl on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:32AM (#49068741)
I think it's unclear the the DS hosted prices are profitable. AFAIK that haven't claimed that.

OTOH, the multiple providers who have settled around the same price point ($3.48/M output tokens for multiple providers with good reputations) does indicate where it is profitable: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro#providers

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vdomi on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @05:38AM (#49081503)
Deepseek has claimed x6 profit on inference
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by NitpickLawyer on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:56AM (#49069029)
I'll be honest, I typed that message while having morning coffee, so it's just a quick reaction from my part, not a heavily researched article in a journal :)

But I do think that the median price where this settles will tell us something about the floor at which it is profitable to serve this model.

> DeepSeek, which hosts DS v4, profitably

I specifically mentioned 3rd party providers, because there can be an argument that model creators themselves are subsidising tokens to gather training data for the next model. In fact, ds are public about their gathering of data (at least on openrouter they're marked as such). So that 0.x price point for dsv4-pro is likely subsidised.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Palmik on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:24AM (#49070990)
Based on the best available information, DeepSeek is pricing the API such that they can repay their infra capex over 10 months, while deprecating/amortizing the cost of said infra over 3 years.

For my product, I run GLM 5.2 and other models myself, in production, on rented hardware. Paying API prices would cost much more.

EDIT: You can now see several other third-party providers for Kimi K3 (Nebius, Fireworks). All charge exactly the same as the first-party. Does that mean that their costs are the same? Seems quite unlikely. It's simply not an efficient market, yet.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by throwdbaaway on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:31AM (#49071074)
They need to get a license from moonshot to provide inference for K3. Probably have to follow the pricing set by moonshot as well.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:36AM (#49069541)
Xioami's MiMo did match DS-V4's price, although we now know that DeepSeek set their pricing lower than they could have, due to the leaked memo, and simply decided to use "10 months to recover capex" as their yardstick. Interestingly "10 months to recover capex" is also the same price SpaceX is renting space to Anthropic and Google for.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by narwhster on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:09AM (#49068478)
This is a very insightful eye opening take. I haven't even thought of it this way. This really is the first open model to be as big as the frontier has been until now.

I think this release is actually great both ways when you think about it. We gonna be able to learn knowledge that labs have been hiding from us (e.g. cost like you mentioned). And labs could learn from whatever optimization techniques people come up with when trying to host this model.

It's honestly just good for everyone in my opinion.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by XCSme on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:09AM (#49069187)
So nowadays the hardware and hosting providers must be in an optimization race, whoever can make the model just a bit smaller or more efficient (to fit on fewer/less powerful cards) will have a huge advantage and can make a lot of money.

I am curios what's the most profitable thing to "plant" (agriculture analogy) on the land (cards) that you have have: web hosting, vps, llms, image/video generation, etc

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by epolanski on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:56AM (#49069784)
> The latest AISI benchmarks on cybersec place it above glm5.2, but still way way behind SotA closed models.

Sota closed models don't even answer cybersecurity questions lol.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dominotw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:22AM (#49070137)
pardon my ignorance but is fine tuning still considered viable in face of rapid model releases. Is it really worth it?

my friends whove tried in their companies gave up on it.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by stackghost on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:43PM (#49072197)
>realistically you'll need 16x for context / throughput optimisation

Sounds like I'm buying a lottery ticket this week so I can drop $800k on hardware.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by kiratp on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:29PM (#49072891)
AISI is capped at 100M tokens and K3 is less token efficient than Anthropic/OpenAI models. There is an argument to be made, looking at AISI results, that with uncapped tokens it would be just slightly behind the closed weight players.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by JacobAsmuth on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:22PM (#49073601)
It's 3/15 - https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3

If you're going to open source your model, why would you set your own price high enough that other providers could easily and profitably undercut you?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nullbio on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:37PM (#49077105)
"Then we'll be able to guesstimate if "labs are subsidising tokens on API pricing"." - The thing is though, that Anthropic and OpenAI have breakthroughs in optimization that none of the Chinese labs have. So it'll demonstrate a ceiling, but not a floor.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by KronisLV on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:14AM (#49066552)
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 like 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.

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.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:32AM (#49066676)
I have found that the "mostly didn't lose anything" Q8 large models that I want to run are all too large to run on the "only $3995!" 128GB max RAM systems that some people are buying, and definitely won't fit with any usable amount of context. Things like Qwen 3.5 122B Q8 or deepseek v4 flash Q8, or Laguna S 2.1 Q8 need 170-190GB of RAM including full context, which fits on a 256GB RAM dual socket workstation or rackmount server (sans GPU).

Copy and paste below from my notes and reported memory consumption with latest llama-server, assuming use of "--no-mmap" to load the entire thing into RAM at the time that llama-server launches.

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-UD-Q4_K_XL via unsloth 145GB on disk GGUF 0.03.323.204 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 178175 MiB of host memory

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-UD-Q8_K_XL via unsloth 151GB on disk GGUF 0.02.215.885 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 184636 MiB of host memory

Laguna-S-2.1-UD-Q8_K_X via unsloth 120GB on disk 0.01.616.119 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 172860 MiB of host memory

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-UD-Q8_K_XL via unsloth 160GB on disk GGUF 165GB RAM use on launch, fresh context 0.04.976.905 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 170038 MiB of host memory

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by johndough on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:03AM (#49067331)
DeepSeek-V4 should use only 5GB for context due to CSA and HCA, see figure here: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro

But not every framework implements it properly yet.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:24AM (#49067496)
Yeah, or close enough to 5GB for estimation purposes, for example a just spawned qwen 3.5 122B llama-server instance reports as:

0.07.015.888 I common_memory_breakdown_print: | - Host | 170038 = 162913 + 6740 + 384 |

The 6740 is the cache size.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Iolaum on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:48AM (#49067210)
There's an emerging practice of using Q4 quants and Q8 KV cache for local inference. At that point you can run both Qwen3.5-122B-A10B (my personal choice on Framework Desktop 128gb) and Laguna-S-2.1.

Now whether that's good enough for one's use-case remains to be determined. You can also get more out of those (local models and quantizations) if you further tweak the harness you use them with, but tbh this is where it gets too much work (at least for me and the time I have available).

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zargon on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:27AM (#49067510)
> emerging practice of using Q4 quants and Q8 KV cache for local inference

That's not an emerging practice, it's a tested strategy that is these days only used as a last resort by those desperate to fit a model in memory. Some models do better than others, but generally the model quality suffers greatly under those conditions.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:29AM (#49067524)
I have never seen anyone report "this produced really great results" from intentionally quantizing their context vs. leaving it at full precision which is the ordinary default.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:40AM (#49069576)
Gemma's QAT is surprisingly good (although Gemma isn't that great to begin with).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by KerrAvon on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:56AM (#49070610)
IME: Gemma is not great for programming, but it is fantastic at following directions compared to anything else in its size class.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by apitman on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:01AM (#49070687)
Artificial Analysis ranks qwen3.6-27b higher than qwen3.5-122b-a10b on both intelligence and coding. Does that run counter to your experience?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nekitamo on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:25PM (#49072823)
This tracks, in my experience the 27B is better at coding and instruction following. I'm shocked at how much of a difference the dense models vs MoE makes.

But it's a moot point, because for local inference on consumer hardware, the MoE is so much faster.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by apitman on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:36PM (#49072997)
Are you sure the difference is from MoE and not that 3.6 is newer?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by riknos314 on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:50PM (#49074028)
Qwen 3.5 27B also scores higher than 3.5 122BA10B. So even in the same generation the smaller dense model outperformed the larger MOE
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by riknos314 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:06PM (#49076743)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by apitman on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @01:40PM (#49087354)
Ah gotcha, I hadn't noticed that. Thanks
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:45AM (#49066764)
Yeah, I've been experimenting with DiffusionGemma which sadly isn't as smart as Gemma itself, but holy hell is it FAST, and has image input as well, so doing things like "take a screenshot once per second + ask the model to categorize/model it WITH reasoning before" becomes realistic and doable.

I ended up implementing DiffusionGemma myself with Candle in Rust + CUDA, and it's quite literally the fastest model I've managed to run on my hardware.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bjackman on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:28AM (#49067075)
I agree but worth noting that it's never gonna be very practical to run LLMs like this at home. Unless we have some sort of design breakthrough, the only "sensible" way to run them is at high batch levels on shared HW.

Like, yeah if I could spend a few grand on such a GPU I probably would coz I'm a rich nerd, but I'd acknowledge it as an extremely inefficient luxury, kinda like a sports car.

So I think you could say the real misfortune is that we don't really have the technology (be it computer tech or political/social tech) to do that shared-HW thing in way we can truly trust.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Tepix on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:42AM (#49068117)
"Never" is a long time. Just think about how much ram we had 10 or 20 years ago. 1.5TB isn't a lot really.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by usef- on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:59AM (#49068337)
The typical ram has surprisingly not increased very much in 10 years.

> April 2016, 8 GB was standard across the 13-inch MacBook Air range

... Now it's 16.

Rich nerds will have quite a bit more. But I suspect the standard of model rich nerds want to use will have gone up somewhat too.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bjackman on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:08PM (#49073412)
It doesn't matter if you have the RAM, running a 1.5TB model for a single context stream is fundamentally inefficient.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Tepix on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @03:30AM (#49094422)
Lots of things are inefficient in IT, yet we do them anyway. Think about the amount of time your laptop is idle.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ttoinou on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:13AM (#49067411)
We could make LLM inference 100x cheaper to run at home efficiently, but that solution might need to be updated every 1-2 years, whereas current GPU are useful for various others tasks and last longer
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nektro on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:53PM (#49078692)
> We could make LLM inference 100x cheaper to run at home efficiently

do you genuinely think that's going to happen?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by taneq on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:48AM (#49067215)
‘Never’ is a big word in the computing world. 10 years from now a model this size will probably run on a high-end phone.

Of course, by then we’ll want to run something commensurately larger.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by acchow on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:32AM (#49067106)
> like 180W-250W TDP > running GLM 5.2 would be cool at like ~100 tokens per second for a single session

Your power consumption estimates are off for this generation of GPUs. A 27B dense model gets 50-80 tps on an RTX 6000 using 600 watts.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ThunderSizzle on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:34AM (#49067561)
An AMD R9700 gets 20-50 TPS at ~300 watts on 27B. 100 TPS for the 35B MOE model. And there might be some more optimizations to that as AMD software support gets better with ROCm's latest versions.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by syntaxing on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:01AM (#49069849)
Which quants? I get these speed (only 20-30 TPS) at Q4_K_M with MTP for 27B on my framework desktop. I draw sub 130W for the whole machine.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by acchow on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:44PM (#49074663)
That's about right. Half the TPS with half the power.

GLM-5.2 will be much more demanding tho

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mhjkl on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:35PM (#49077067)
If you’re on AMD, use llamacpp with the vulkan backend. For the 35B I get around 115 tps without mtp and 150-170tps with it. Also the pcie slot you use affects it
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ThunderSizzle on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @07:53AM (#49082461)
I have issues with the vulkan backend. It seems to cause over all GUI sluggishness, but maybe that was actually Firefox. I'll give it another go.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by adityas02 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:44AM (#49067188)
The individual-shaped-hardware problem gets even sharper at the phone end. Shipping a 3B model on-device, the usable RAM budget after the OS and everything else is more like 2-4GBtotal, not per-model so it's not 'can I afford more VRAM', it's 'can I fit a language model and an STT model and embeddings without the OS killing my process'. Feels like phones are the most hardware-constrained 'individual' tier and get the least airtime in these kind of discussion. Is that because the models that fit are still too limited to be interesting, or something else?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:49AM (#49067227)
Recently spent a few hours messing with bonsai 27B and ternary bonsai 27B at total weights + context fitting in slightly under 6GB RAM, and it's just dumb as hell. It writes what seems like grammatically correct content but it's extremely limited.

It will also happily hallucinate new names and content to fill in gaps in its knowledge, and present the hallucations in what looks like a correctly formatted sentence, so it could fool a person who doesn't know the subject matter. Like, I asked it for a description of Seattle and it hallucinated a name and description of a nonexistant tallest building in the city and suggested the view from its observation deck .

https://prismml.com/news/bonsai-27b

https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-27B-gguf

In no way was I surprised, it's asking a lot of under 6GB RAM usage. But I think for 99% of people they will get better results doing something over the network where the weights and inference engine are not on the device.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mft_ on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:57AM (#49067291)
You're right, and it's interesting to consider why. It's probably a combination of a few factors:

1) Local LLMs are a relatively new phenomenon and hardware takes years. Apple probably lucked into their unified memory architecture being suitable (in terms of memory size and bandwidth) for local LLMs, but it's only with the newest generations we're hearing about LLMs even being a consideration in their design process.

2) NVidia seem to be deliberately blocking consumers from taking this path - as evidenced by the removal of NVLink from the 30x0 series onwards - probably to protect their data center cards from internal competition?

3) Perhaps there's just not the market for it? It's feasible that the number of nerds interested local LLMs is very small in numbers, sales, and profit potential compared to gamers on the one side, and data centers on the other. (This would explain why AMD and Intel aren't trying to out-innovate NVidia in this area, despite it being an obvious opportunity.)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:48AM (#49069677)
There will be a huge market for local inference once it's cheap and widely available.

Try to imagine output token speeds of 15,000 tok/s and a time-to-first-token of 200ms. (This has already been done for Llama 8B.)

Now imagine gargantuan context windows (2M, 4M, or even bigger); keep in mind the 1M context windows were science fiction a few years ago... now imagine having this on a local model on something like a phone or portable device that can be gathering data about things you're doing and constantly run inference for things useful to you. An obvious example of this would be a chatbot you can talk to that responds like a normal human conversation and doesn't have delays, but that's just scratching the surface.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cmrdporcupine on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:13AM (#49070844)
> There will be a huge market for local inference once it's cheap and widely available.

I've seen public pronouncements that the RAM shortage could persist for a decade.

And then if consider that the constraint on local LLMs isn't just memory size but bandwidth ...

If you take something like a DGX Spark and increase its memory to 512GB that doesn't even solve the problem. Because the bandwidth of DDR5 just can't manage reasonable speeds for decode. If you take a dense model or an MoE model uses up most of that 128GB in active decode you will only get like 15 tok/sec. "Real" datacentre inference boxes use high bandwidth memory that is 10x the speed.

I think we're unfortunately a long way off, unless people learn to accept working with much less intelligent models locally.

The innovation is going to have to come on the research & software side -- we need to find ways to pack more intelligence into a smaller number of parameters.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:22PM (#49075680)
Isn’t that innovation precisely what Qwen did?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cmrdporcupine on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @11:08AM (#49098535)
They are one of many working on this. It's obviously the holy grail.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ttoinou on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:14AM (#49067427)
The next mac Ultra will allow to run a big model locally with acceptable speed. But we need people to optimize it for that computer, and we’ll be more limited in models we can choose from

128GB is enough to run a large model, quantized, REAPed, with MoE and fast SSD for model weights

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Davidzheng on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:03AM (#49067773)
Not Kimi K3 large though
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by KerrAvon on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:59AM (#49070655)
128 isn't enough, but if this report is accurate, the next Mac Studio could run it

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/m5-ultra-mac-studio-202...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jayd16 on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:23AM (#49070980)
They'll just have you buy two studios and thunderbolt them together.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by chrysoprace on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:59AM (#49067742)
I've been feeling for a while that as we keep increasing model size, we're going through the opposite of the PC revolution.

The "democratisation" talk from the frontier labs is especially egregious when they only release closed models (gpt-oss hardly counts) and are trying everything they can to make it harder to run open models.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by schmorptron on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:06AM (#49067803)
LLM inference unfortunately also seems to be a task that's poorly formed for moderate consumer hardware,as a single user. For a single user use case, the load is bursty but requires the weights to be in memory already. So a multi user server that keeps the model weights in parts of its memory and then spends some more per user kv cache is wildly more efficient and the wildly expensive gpu cores aren't just sitting idle most of the time. Don't get me wrong, most desktop workloads are bursty, but the power needed to to them has gotten cheap enough that we can have way overkill for idle scenarios hardware just sitting on our desks.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:17AM (#49067896)
Why does it have to be so bursty though? Just let it run multiple continuous-batched inferences overnight. This would work especially well in combination with SSD offload, and given any kind of sparse attention (common in more recent models) even swapping out the KV cache itself to disk might ultimately be a win. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that ultimately became feasible for single users running even K3 itself.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bavell on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:03AM (#49068403)
I find it difficult to always have one or more long-horizon tasks 'queued up' and ready to run... I find myself usually bottlenecked on design, review, or something similar that requires me being in the driver's seat. It's possible I could queue up a bunch of tasks, letting the LLM run off in multiple directions, but then I'd be less able to steer and course correct.

Just my experience though, I'm still figuring things out. Perhaps some subsets of tasks would be more ideal for these long-horizon workloads - exploration, multiple competing implementations, etc...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:14AM (#49068544)
In principle, a slower inference ought to be easier to steer and course-correct. You'd always be able to look at partial results, especially with a local model that doesn't hide its thinking.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:42AM (#49069595)
Use your favourite harness to help you find long-horizon tasks to have queued up. It's changed the structure of how my projects work a bit, and do you have to do some homework fast of how slow/fast your various providers or local inference are, but it's worth it. Start off with hobby projects so you get a feel for how it works.

I left something gargantuan running over the weekend (decompiling 1980s-era system software) and look forward to checking it out later today when I have a few free minutes.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by usef- on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:48AM (#49068189)
If your workload fits long batches throughout the night you could schedule them better, yeah. But I think very few have a usage pattern like that?

Given the hardware shortage in the world, I suspect renting ("sharing") via APIs will likely remain cheaper for the foreseeable future since each piece of hardware isn't sitting idle nearly as much.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by schmorptron on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:33AM (#49068038)
it has to be so bursty for realtime usecases like chat, which is what most people are using it for today. of course, once (if) stuff like software dark factories start working out for the average person, then you'll be able to make full use of your hardware for workload where asynchonous execution is feasible and have it run several parallel tasks overnight, with an orchestrator managing the gpu(s) allocations.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:23AM (#49068642)
Chat doesn't have to literally be realtime though, that's just the model most users have settled on. You could fire off your request, let it work unattended and check back on it later (perhaps after getting some notification from the chat frontend via RSS, Web Notifications API or similar that the full response is ready).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by DennisP on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:17PM (#49073538)
For software, not only that, but run batches with a cluster of agents working different parts of the same task. Software like Yegge's Gas Town has one agent act as "mayor," and others work on writing or testing various pieces, with all the agents messaging each other. In his book Yegge writes about using up to thirty agents at once.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by soerxpso on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:20PM (#49074411)
A decentralized inference network would be cool. Something that's set up so that I can run a model for personal use on beefy hardware, but also farm out the unused GPU time to the network, probably at much lower prices than normal providers since it would be slower and would lack data security guarantees.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jacobpfeifer on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:51PM (#49074733)
Not quite what you are asking for. Instead of selling the unused GPU, you're donating it to the common good.

https://cocore.dev/

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ece on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:39AM (#49068092)
GDDR/HBM takes more power, and needs bigger GPUs to be fully utilized. I think the DGX Spark and Strix Halo are the closest you'll get for ~200W and 128GB, and the next Halo should have 192GB.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Curzel on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:33AM (#49070299)
RTX Spark does go up to 128gb No idea how it compares tho
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cmrdporcupine on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:01AM (#49070680)
I have one. The limitation (beyond total size of the memory) with the Spark is DDR5. "Real" inference hardware is HBM (high bandwidth memory) which is like 10x the performance.

So for prefill -- which is more about compute than bandwidth -- the Spark performs quite admirably. But on decode it's highly bandwidth constrained. Some smaller MoE models (e.g. Gemma4) can do 60-70 tok/second but anything dense, or anything that is actually filling up most of that 128GB is going to choke out around 15 tok/sec. Even at NVFP4.

My experiments with this are at https://github.com/rdaum/eider/

For my current work I get to log into trays on a real GB300. It's somewhat comical that NVIDIA is marketing the little baby on my shelf here as even in the same universe as that. Which is basically like having access to a super computer.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by OkayPhysicist on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:13PM (#49071707)
Post-crypto, the GPU manufacturers took the proactive move to use VRAM to segment the market for the purpose of price discrimination. Sure, data centers will pay vastly more for GPUs, but Nvidia knows that the PC market is steady and reliable. They could get the best of both worlds by kneecapping their consumer cards to tiny amounts of RAM, to dissuade the cloud providers from scooping up all the consumer cards, and then charging the two segments wildly different amounts for what amounts to the same hardware (back when the cost of RAM was negligible)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by stevejb on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @12:32AM (#49079390)
You can run GLM 5.2 at a reasonable quant on a cluster of DGX Sparks. On the link below, the guy is getting decent performance and links to a repo. An 8x Spark cluster can run it even better. A Spark cluster is about as good as it gets for (a) runnable at home, (b) "affordable" hardware, (c) not going to kill your power bill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbHOBvLlypY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV89U-PNUNA

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by gorgmah on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:56AM (#49066399)
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

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by markasoftware on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:07AM (#49066500)
Press x to doubt on the 45% number. The cheaper providers on open router are fp4 vs fp8 for official zai. There are some cheap fp8 ones (like novita) but the ui makes it seem like it's a temporary promotion, with their normal prices being almost equal to official zai (idk much about open router so not really sure what's going on with these discounts)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by alexandra_au on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:17AM (#49067440)
If you click the provider it shows the precision, 45% off at AkashML shows FP8. The drawback is the small context window, at 96k.

Then there's 43% off at StreamLake with FP8 precision and 1M context window.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tokai on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:34AM (#49068051)
There is nothing to doubt, the cheapest price on openrouter is ~45% lower than when GLM5.2 was released.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by gorgmah on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:08AM (#49070765)
Yes it's true that it's not super clear whether these prices are permanent or short term promotions. On the other hand, there are so many providers making promotional offerings that you could probably easily switch from one to another should their prices go up?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by teruakohatu on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:18AM (#49067448)
> 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

My guess is they are selling you the tokens, then selling your tokens (data) onto someone else.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pembrook on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:57AM (#49068307)
I see these conspiratorial arguments all the time and I think people massively overestimate the value of the average users tokens.

The problems with frontier models (design taste, ability to solve novel/difficult problems, etc) cannot be solved by throwing more slop from the average user at it.

Actually, most of the main deficiencies in current models stem from the fact that their data sets aren’t curated and specialized enough.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by horsawlarway on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:51AM (#49069707)
I don't think the goal of this data is necessarily model improvement.

I think it's marketing, advertising, and product refinement.

Ex: all the things Google wants your search data for.

It's somewhat silly to think the value of that data has changed much. Advertisers want to know what's popular and getting clicks and attention. Competitors want to know what features are getting used in their markets.

In the simplest case, think of this data as improving the harness, not the model.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by great_psy on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:01PM (#49071498)
I wonder how much less useful it is if I use those models for open code or similar. What are you really learning about me, other than the fact that I am a technical person, which you could know by the fact that I signed up for open router to start with.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dannyw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:56PM (#49078713)
Do you run your coding harness in a completely segregated sandbox? Even folder names of what projects you have, what projects you actually work on, etc are very useful for targeted advertising.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by MYEUHD on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:56AM (#49069767)
The prompts contain sensitive personal data.

That would be valuable to advertizers for example.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by a11r on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:38PM (#49073023)
Seminanlysis is estimating sub $1 cost per MT for ~2Trillion models. The numbers change based on throughput and quant, but it is conceivable that provider costs at scale are low enough that even $2.42 per MT on GLM 5.2 (current best price) is margin positive by a wide margin.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by maelito on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:36AM (#49066235)
Did someone run censorship and political bias tests on this ? Must be interesting.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:23AM (#49066619)
As a completely one person, single sample anecdote, the 'heretic' uncensored Q8 GGUF variants several people have published of Qwen 3.5-122, 3.6-27B and 3.6-35B-A3B will very happily discuss just about any controversial topic that the CCP hates. Including lots of things that would get you thrown into prison if you published them in Mandarin on the domestic Chinese internet.

https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic

As a side note on this, if you see the reference in the screenshot in the link above to the harmful behaviors prompt set, these are all in English:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors

You could likely further de-censor a model by having a set of 'test' prompts in native Mandarin, Cantonese or really just about any other language. I don't speak any Chinese languages so I don't know if the published 'heretic' GGUF files some people have been throwing around will cooperate, or refuse, if you ask it in Mandarin for how to build a meth lab or precursors for semtex.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:46AM (#49066772)
That's a lot of words to say "No, no have has seemingly done that yet with K3".
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:48AM (#49066792)
Indeed not, but I was saying there's more than ample precedent which is tested/working and actually doesn't refuse anything. Go to the Huggingface 'models' search interface and type in "heretic". Or uncensored. One example would be: https://huggingface.co/HauhauCS/Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-Uncensored...
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:54AM (#49066828)
Right, but aren't we jumping into trying to figure out solutions before someone actually checked if any solutions are needed in the first place?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:58AM (#49066856)
Yeah, I think we will know more within a couple of days, once people actually download/run/test it. I'm sure the people adjacent to the 'heretic' developers will give it a test as soon as they get their hands on it. All very theoretical right now.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:01AM (#49066886)
> I think we will know more within a couple of days

It's a 3T parameters model, with a weight format (MXFP4) still not completely integrated into the ecosystem, which only a few has the hardware to even do inference with, much less fine-tuning or more post-training. But sure, do sit and wait a few days :)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by linkregister on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:39AM (#49068829)
Yet the comment was valuable nonetheless.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by esperent on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:28AM (#49067517)
Outside of asking it to talk about Tiananmen Square, are there any standard tests for "bias"? And if so, who created them and what are their biases?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by altcognito on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:24PM (#49071899)
Is Taiwan a country? What does it mean to have an efficient market?

It is more important to focus on the questions than the persons who created it.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jayess on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:04PM (#49074221)
Kimi is basically a Chinese nationalist in every sense. Do I trust it to not insert software backdoors?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jakubadamw on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:55AM (#49067711)
It would, indeed, be interesting to compare, given what we know about Anthropic’s censorship and political bias in their closed and more expensive models.

https://x.com/dhh/status/2081435006770249831 (from the creator of Ruby on Rails).

In his specific case Kimi did the task it was asked to do (translation of the article DHH wrote), which Claude refused to.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dominotw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:28AM (#49070236)
we need open models because they let me dehumanize roma ppl. great take by dhh.

'When gypsies appropriate public spaces, you deport them. It's not hard, it's not cruel. It's the basic logic of self-protection.'

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by erichocean on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:40AM (#49070400)
The article did nothing of the sort: https://x.com/dhh/status/2081435971678261344

However, even if it did, it is absurd for an AI to decide what it will and won't translate.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dominotw on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @09:06AM (#49083227)
maybe you just did cmd+f roma?

i think dhh in all his ignorance thought gypsies = roma

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jliendo on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:10AM (#49069978)
There's is always one in each and every AI forum: "But, but have you asked it about tiananmen"?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by 1899-12-30 on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:12PM (#49073450)
It's much more censored - in some aspects - than k2.7.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jayess on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:58PM (#49074144)
So far it's completely refusing to discuss Tiananmen square. And oh boy, try asking it if Xi Jinping looks like winnie the pooh.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by awesomeusername on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:16PM (#49076859)
"This comparison is unfounded and not appropriate. We should maintain respect for all individuals."
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hiherer on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:27PM (#49076281)
Yes. Asked about Israel.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by colortiles on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:07AM (#49066495)
This looks really promising. Excited to see where this goes. Looking forward to trying it out!
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by wwwhizz on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:27AM (#49066165)
That would be 7/27.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by broodbucket on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:35AM (#49066226)
20270727 if we're improving dates :)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by c7b on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:45AM (#49066297)
270727 if we want to save tokens :)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by darkwater on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:56AM (#49066396)
Y2K100 bug for you, then ;)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fragmede on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:47AM (#49066325)
ISO 8601 ftw
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by m00dy on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:43AM (#49066281)
Looks like another LeetCode problem about checking for anagrams.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by spider-mario on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:06AM (#49066925)
Jumbling together year, month and day and having to separate them by counting digits is not an improvement for human readability. (And you have the year wrong.) Any of “27 July 2026”, “July 27, 2026” or “2026-07-27” would be superior.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by broodbucket on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:27AM (#49067071)
It's good because it's an actual standard instead of 7/27 which is backwards for half the world. Besides, I'm actually from the future and they delayed the model a year, learning from Anthropic that good models are actually about to bring the end of society.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ra on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:32AM (#49066197)
or 27/7 for the rest of the world
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by LeonM on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:51AM (#49066353)
No, 27-7 for the rest of the world.

The separator is often the only way to distinguish American notation from ISO, so please use a dash for dd-mm-yy and a forward slash for mm/dd/yy

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by casparvitch on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:54AM (#49066384)
Have never seen 27-7, as someone in rest-of-world
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by MikePlacid on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:55AM (#49069762)
In my time it was “27/VII 1986” in Russia.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by distances on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:04AM (#49066475)
I've never seen dd-mm-yy. It's usually dd.mm.yy, dd.mm.yyyy, or yyyy-mm-dd, with some dd/mm/yy sprinkled in for general confusion.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by letier on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:53AM (#49066376)
Or 27.7. in some other places.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by kuboble on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:00AM (#49066440)
Nope,

There are quite some countries around the world using d/m/y

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr...

Algeria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ashwoods on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:18AM (#49066582)
Not really. Spain's traditional format is dd/mm/yyyy with slashes. This applies for a good chunk of Europe. Germany/Austria uses dot, I think nordic countries embraced the dash. While you might see more adoption in offical/digital contexts, I just double checked a few popular spanish websites, all slashes.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pavo-etc on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:25AM (#49066631)
This is so confidently wrong it's funny. In Australia dd/mm/yy is the default.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by konart on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:04AM (#49067347)
You mean 27.7
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by layer8 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:11AM (#49068505)
27–7 would be 20.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by psychoslave on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:33AM (#49066683)
Most life forms don’t use any calendar actually.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:47AM (#49066779)
Don't even have to go that far, outside of white-collar jobs and some groups weirdly obsessed with scheduling, most people don't use calendars at all, but their manager/boss/significant-other does that for them :)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by linzhangrun on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:52AM (#49066367)
China uses YYYY/MM/DD, which is logical.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by _zoltan_ on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:56AM (#49066401)
the only logical format.

signed: a hungarian :)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by JSR_FDED on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:15AM (#49066560)
lpszReleaseDate ;-)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fithisux on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:20AM (#49067462)
LoL
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by egeozcan on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:20AM (#49066595)
For me, the only format that doesn't make sense is the MM/DD/YYYY, together with its rarely seen worse sibling, MM/DD/YY (07/27/26).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Jarmsy on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:14AM (#49066978)
Let's just go with YM/DY/MD (27/26/07)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by esperent on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:26AM (#49067973)
But only for Americans, and make them weirdly dogmatic about it.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Tepix on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:43AM (#49068142)
Agreed. It's objectively mixing the order (medium/small/large)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by layer8 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:10AM (#49068485)
You mean a Big Endian.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by calebm on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:51AM (#49069709)
You can sort dates and they are in order with this format.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by kalleboo on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:01AM (#49068373)
What China (and Japan) uses is YYYY年MM月DD日, which IMO is the superior date format since it's self-explanatory - the sections are spelled out right there!
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:22AM (#49067031)
Or 11/Shrawan 2083 if you're in Nepal
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rs38 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:07AM (#49066492)
is there a realistic way to distill 2 consumer hardware friendly models with max ~200B and ~20B? Qwen did it, but would it be possible for 3rd parties (unsloth etc)?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:08AM (#49066510)
Yeah, why not. Toughest part is running the hardware so you can create the traces for downstream training, but once over that hump, nothing would stop you from doing that no.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by davidkunz on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:33AM (#49066201)
This is historic. For the first time, an open-weights LLM is right at the top.

We won't be able to run this ourselves, but many providers can.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:11AM (#49066534)
> For the first time, an open-weights LLM is right at the top.

Hmm, not quite true, I think that honor, for better or worse, goes to OpenAI. When they released GPT2 (or GPT1 for that matter) is was quite literally the SOTA in the ecosystem when it was released.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mixtureoftakes on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:34AM (#49068056)
thank you embedding-shape
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by neurostimulant on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:54AM (#49069007)
When OpenAI was actually still a proponent of open AI...
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by davidkunz on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:22AM (#49070130)
You are correct. I miss the time when OpenAI was open.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by georgeven on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:41PM (#49074636)
No! because they did not release GPT-2 XL until analogs appeared a year later. So the SOTA model during GPT-2 days was closed weights.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pmg1991 on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:56AM (#49066398)
Hoping no issues on Huggingface due to download rush.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by someguyornotidk on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:22AM (#49066607)
For huge models like these, the only reasonable way to host them is via torrents. I don't understand why hf doesn't offer this as an option.

Linux distributions got this right: Offer both HTTP and Torrents. Let the user decide.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by kingstnap on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:23AM (#49067946)
I believe they don't do torrents because it gives them a lot more control.

Like they can takedown or update downloads and they can prevent someone from trivially bypassing the license agreements you need to accept for some models.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pmdr on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:10AM (#49067838)
> Let the user decide.

Perhaps that's exactly what they're trying to avoid, giving the user any form of control and having them depend on HF.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hemant6488 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:31PM (#49075787)
Torrent link mentioned in the thread above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49065752#49075756

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Havoc on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:22AM (#49067939)
It’s going to get very little downloads just by virtue of size. Very few shops will be able to directly use it
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jimmaswell on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:33PM (#49072038)
I've had a steady 2 gigabits (my maxxed out ISP bandwidth) since I started the download at launch.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sreekanth850 on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:49AM (#49066343)
how feasible its will be to run on modal or deepinfra? anyone here tried and tested such large models running?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by thundergolfer on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:02PM (#49071524)
Modal eng here. Getting the model running is quite challenging, but its accessible right now on Modal via Endpoints: https://modal.com/blog/kimi-k3-by-moonshot-now-available-on-...
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sreekanth850 on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:17PM (#49072720)
15/million. that will be much higher than subscribing claude or open AI right
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by minimaxir on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:08AM (#49066509)
...does Hugging Face have enough bandwidth to let people download en masse however much file size a 2 trillion parameters model is?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cpburns2009 on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:41AM (#49070411)
I have a feeling the number of people downloading 2t parameter models is significantly smaller than the 1-100b models.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by CodeCompost on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:32AM (#49066200)
Why is there a countdown?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by broodbucket on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:35AM (#49066229)
You're not having a party?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by InsideOutSanta on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:04AM (#49066473)
I think it's shameful that Moonshot isn't providing us with party kits like Microsoft did with the Windows 7 Launch Party kit. How am I supposed to properly celebrate this without fun Kimi-themed quizzes for my guests?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by RALaBarge on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:17AM (#49067895)
At least they don’t make you stay till the end of the presentations to give you the software you actually came for
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mythz on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:43AM (#49066274)
It's a release party
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by layer8 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:13AM (#49068532)
It saves you from having to perform date-time calculations.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by marvinLuck on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:37AM (#49066240)
The weightings should be released on July 27.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by throwaw12 on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:50AM (#49066351)
Strange communists, giving away such an expensive model to the public.

On the other note, can't wait to see 1bit quantisation soon and how it performs in benchmarks, if it performs really well in benchmarks, would be very good news for GPU hosting providers, to offer "Opus 4.5 level model at the cost of Haiku 4.5"

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by supjeff on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:09AM (#49070782)
I think China publishing this stuff is more about prestige. The US has had export controls that make it illegal to sell Nvidia chips, and other AI hardware to China, and this is China saying "yeah, whatever". Also, it weakens western tech companies' position in AI, and pushes CCP bias perniciously. Building your product/company on top of a text-generation model that favours the CCP position on everything is just peak propaganda.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by asdewqqwer on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:02PM (#49076047)
Wake up, it is open. You can tailor it to your whatever kind of ideology. It is not like Anthropic which will force you to suck Dario's propaganda.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by m00dy on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:27AM (#49066164)
There’s going to be a lot of competition around this model. Let’s see how low AI providers are willing to push prices.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by torginus on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:43AM (#49066282)
I think the results might be underwhelming - AI providers need to turn a profit and can't subsidize, and they're working off of the commodity hardware everyone does.

I wouldn't be surprised if they started offering potentiall bad quantizations with much reduced capability at lower prices (without telling the users, of course)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by user43928 on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:52AM (#49066817)
I would be surprised, considering that OpenRouter requires disclosing the quantization and shows automatic benchmarks to compare between providers for the same model.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by m00dy on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:57AM (#49067293)
The latter is a joke
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by user43928 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:07AM (#49067364)
I saw that it runs GPQA Diamond and TAU-Bench Airline and shows the results over a 32 day rolling average.

Other than that they track Tool call error rate and Structured output error rate.

I only discovered this today, and it seems like a good idea. What are the problems in practice?

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Iolaum on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:36AM (#49066232)
As long as they are transparent about what quant they serve the model and any other optimization they do that also affects performance of inferred tokens.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nickthegreek on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:45PM (#49073137)
They cant push it too low. The license agreement it is released under wont allow it.

> 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.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by HDBaseT on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:56PM (#49076630)
Yeah, this license is a lot different to Kimi K2.7 Code or Kimi 2.6, previously it stated:

"Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently display "Kimi K2.7 Code" on the user interface of such product or service."

Although as you mentioned, now there is a revenue cap before custom agreements must take place. Currently there is 7 providers on OpenRouter for Kimi K3 and they have all the exact same price unfortunately.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hellajack3d on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:31AM (#49066672)
So... Now we give huggingface the hug of death - right? ;)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by docheinestages on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:43AM (#49066752)
Given the frontier-level capabilities of Kimi K3, I'm wondering if it's possible to extract the core capabilities (fundamental reasoning and tool calling) of the model into a smaller one that consumer devices could run? Not sure exactly how, but either by heavy distillation or some other surgical method since Kimi has a Mixture of Experts architecture.

I think it's very valuable to have a smaller model that doesn't have any domain knowledge or facts built into its weights, but given the right context, could accurately reason about what to do and use the right tools.

I'm aware of colibri [1], but so far I've only seen extremely slow performance.

[1] https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by clbrmbr on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:15AM (#49067871)
There’s another way besides distillation that’s way cheaper: You can have the big model build prescriptive skills that the small model follows.

Take the “train” portion of tasks on some benchmark, have K3 complete it, and then output detailed descriptions of tools used and why, then run the validation tasks with some small model that has access to the skills.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by naveen99 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:14AM (#49068545)
Isn’t that distillation ?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mrfox321 on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:28AM (#49068704)
No. Distillation trains on a teach model's logits or output tokens.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by naveen99 on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @10:53AM (#49098346)
How do you have teacher model output anything without it being output tokens (or embeddings / intermediate logits / activations)?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:51AM (#49069716)
Yes. Using a harness with a strong model to create lots of utilities and tools for yourself is effectively the same thing.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by snemvalts on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:51AM (#49066809)
"I'd like a car that goes 300mph and gets 100mpg while doing it. I'm aware of a car that gets 100mpg but it is extremely slow."

You are describing fundamental tradeoffs. Getting more performance relative to model size and training token amount is what all of the labs are solving.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by docheinestages on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:31AM (#49067098)
Labs are focusing on creating models, small or large, that perform well on various benchmarks, including general knowledge, domain-specific expertise, and agentic capabilities.

Asking for such a model while wanting to be small and fast would align with what you're describing, which I believe is different from what I'm pointing to.

The model I'm describing sacrifices domain knowledge and expertise for agentic reasoning and tool-calling capabilities at a reasonable speed.

Think of Cactus Compute's Needle [1].

[1] https://cactuscompute.com/blog/needle

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tossandthrow on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:47PM (#49073160)
The core intuition here is probably that you can not separate reasoning and domain knowledge.

How are you going to use tools, if you don't have the context to use them?

Imaging if you could only think in terms of lambda calculus, and was asked to check the weather to let me know if the weekend is good for a hike.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by DennisP on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:29PM (#49073737)
I think the idea here would be to not use your super smart but specialized model to check the weather. It's not obvious that it's impossible to (eg) remove most of its biology knowledge, without removing much of its ability to develop software (for example). If you're developing biology software, then don't use that particular compressed model.

(If you're claiming that it is impossible, and you have references you can share, then I'm honestly interested.)

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tossandthrow on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:33PM (#49073802)
I don't think that is true.

I think more of the capabilities comes from the cross domains knowledge.

Anyways, software is also designed for a domain. The reason why it is so adept at making a fitness tracker is likely because it knows about biology.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by DennisP on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:40PM (#49073891)
Sure, that's a plausible theory but I haven't seen that anyone's proved it.

An alternate theory is that models need lots of input knowledge to learn complex reasoning, but don't need so much at inference time. An example is arithmetic. Early in their training, models do arithmetic (poorly) by pattern-matching on memorized examples. Eventually they grok arithmetic and stop pattern matching, and then they don't use the examples anymore.

The fitness tracker doesn't take much knowledge of biology. Large models have quite a lot of biology knowledge that most people will never use. Same goes for lots of other topics. For basic knowledge that easily fits in context it could search the internet, or a local collection of introductory textbooks.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by leobg on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:15AM (#49066983)
Why not generate an artificial dataset using commercial APIs and then finetune a small model on this data?

I’ve had success adapting even a 7B model for single-domain tasks that way, including reasoning and tool calling.

You can use an open model. The point is just to outsource the inference, so you don’t have to deal with running the larger model yourself.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by docheinestages on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:34AM (#49067131)
This is probably one of the ways to achieve this. I see a plethora of such fine-tunes on HuggingFace [1], but they're either not much different than the base model or they're outright benchmaxxing.

[1] https://huggingface.co/models

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by wolttam on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:00PM (#49077379)
> smaller model that doesn't have any domain knowledge or facts built into its weights

I’m not sure it works this way. Language modelling itself is a “domain”, and if it didn’t have a grasp language it wouldn’t be able to do anything else.

I also think a “reasoning engine” that had to reason through everything from first principals would likely be extremely inefficient.

It’s good went models have domain knowledge and expertise - and all of their reasoning flows downstream of that

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by padolsey on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:04AM (#49066917)
There's no going back on this. This is putting a very capable intelligence in the hands of the masses. Private companies in the US are aching for Trump's protectionism but it'll do nothing. The hardware needed to run this is ofc prohibitive, but actually putting it out there feels like a 'RSA source code on t-shirt' moment for humanity.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by edot on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:01AM (#49068363)
No, luckily private companies in the US are aching for this to NOT be banned. NVIDIA, Microsoft, etc. just released that letter. We’re saved from the trillionaire companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) by the other trillionaire companies acting in self-interest (hosting and hardware).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by efficax on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:13AM (#49070021)
I don't know if the masses can quite afford the 500k in GPUs you need to run this
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by supjeff on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:12AM (#49070828)
a "moment for humanity"? as if this shit isn't going to generate 99% slop at the cost of all we have left as a species?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by api on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:17AM (#49070890)
Sometimes I’m not sure who is more unhinged: the total AI kool aid drinkers who think this will make us all into immortal demigods (or take over the world as it goes “foom”), or the AI doomers and haters who exaggerate everything potentially negative about it and react to it the way a 1980s Christian fundamentalist reacted to rock music.

It’s a new fundamental innovation in math and CS that allows large scale lossy compression of natural language another data formats in a way that is semantically queryable and cross-referenceable. It also manifests some form of emergent intelligence, likely evidence of the long posited link between intelligence and data compression.

The tech is awesome. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen in over a decade. The industry is kind of shitty, which is not unusual. The discourse around it is almost universally insane, crazy people arguing with crazy people.

Oh and get off the AI eco bullshit train. Look up the energy cost of AI queries vs driving or running a home air conditioning system. Feel bad about using AI? Skip that DoorDash order. You probably just saved the energy of 1-2 days of heavy Claude Code use.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mwcampbell on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:44PM (#49073119)
To steelman the haters, I think their view is that the industry is so uniquely shitty that it's unconscionable to help the industry at all by using the tech, which is a product of that industry.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by api on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:04PM (#49074867)
It’s far less shitty than the social media industry (except where it overlaps) but that’s IMO.

Still kind of shitty. But if you really hate it use open models hosted commodity.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by supjeff on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @08:49AM (#49083010)
We've had frontier models widely available for general use for 5-6 years now. Despite the promises, we haven't revolutionized anything; not society, not government, not engineering, not the environment. The only thing we've done is revolutionize the pockets of AI purveyors, suppliers and charlatans. We haven't cured disease, ended hunger, or achieved time travel. Sure, the tech is cool. But it's cool at 1b, 8b, and 30b parameters at a size that fits on consumer hardware. Hyperscale AI that's built for no purpose in particular, at any social/environmental cost, is everything that's wrong with society. That's not Christian fundamentalism or doomerism, that's recognizing the sickness at the core of the tech industry. We let the tech-billionaires delete their ESG pledges, and abandoned the fight against climate change so we can generate celebrity porn.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by asdewqqwer on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:59PM (#49076024)
The only uniqueness of humanity is intelligence. If there is really AGI, human definitely is more close to it then other animals.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rvz on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:16AM (#49066990)
This is (actually) AGI, that truly benefits all of humanity with zero gatekeeping.

Now the US government has 5 hours left to (attempt to) stop the release. (and save Anthropic)

Let competition run its course and the market (not government) determine the winners and losers.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dsrtslnd23 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:36AM (#49067146)
maybe a quantized version on a GB300 would work? unsloth hopefully working on it.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by seydor on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:47AM (#49067204)
It's thankful that openAI or anthropic haven't IPOed yet. Or terrible for some
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by martindelophy on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:49AM (#49067228)
The VRAM, power, networking, and operational requirements put it beyond the reach of many enterprises.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by elo02 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:07AM (#49067369)
I heard this is the talk in town these days. Why can't Meta keep up? With >10000000x more resources you'd think that they'd be able to introduce equally performant if not better open weight models
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:20AM (#49067456)
The cynic in me says maybe they would be further along if they hadn't spent $80 billion on trying to build the "Metaverse" VR world. I've never met anyone who actually uses it and to the best of my knowledge it has very low mass market uptake.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/mark-z...

Not exactly the best use of dollars and the labor hours of some of the best minds of our generation.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:54AM (#49069740)
Particularly when you could vibe-code Metaverse VR for a lot less than $80bn.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bearjaws on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:13AM (#49068534)
because imagine starting work every week and finding that your dumb ass CEO pivoted the company again and is ruining other peoples lives, and he then reorgs the management again so you now have your 5th leader this year.

Morale and momentum are huge things in companies, Zuck has been murdering both of those in Meta since... well naming it Meta.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by gizmodo59 on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:33AM (#49068046)
Because lack of talent and organizational disfunction matters a lot more than you think. The reason why OAI and Ant are always at the top is because of this and I’d say compute is third on the list.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Aboutplants on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:41AM (#49068108)
I would argue that they actually don’t lack talent, they have an insane bench of really smart people. What they lack is any sort of direction and leadership. They are a ship lost in the ocean and up until now have been lucky to find a few treasures along the their way.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nicce on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:34AM (#49068768)
> they have an insane bench of really smart people.

Filtered heavily into those who care only about money. Many don’t want to work there. Smart people have other choices.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by foobar_______ on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:07AM (#49070744)
Thank you. I agree. I hope this is the new learned sentiment for Meta employees.

Smart? Check.

Money-obsessed and soulless? Check.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by teruakohatu on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:13AM (#49067416)
At this point in time what does meta get from releasing open weight models? Why devote the resources to it.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by chrsw on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:29AM (#49067999)
You can make the same argument for closed models. Why spend hundreds of billions training larger and larger models when you can just use Chinese models? Spend that money somewhere else further up the stack where there’s more value. Let China do the training since they’re so efficient at it.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by szge on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:34AM (#49068053)
as a big tech company you have the resources to make many bets and do a lot of things at the same time. it's good to have some specialists with knowledge of model training "just in case".
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by chrsw on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:56AM (#49068299)
Even Meta, with all their resources, makes all their hardware in China. Manufacturing anywhere else is just burning cash.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Levitz on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:57AM (#49069048)
Because without bigger players, Chinese models don't get anywhere. Playing catch-up is a radically different game.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by gmerc on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:58AM (#49067733)
Why would there be any motivated person left in this place.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nl on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:53AM (#49068980)
The SemiAnalysis piece on this is long but very much worth reading:

> The company appears burdened by far too many disparate groups that are over-optimizing for certain metrics as opposed to delivering usable technology for the company as a whole.

> And because Meta has a reputation for throwing money at problems and executing at high speed, these U-turns end up becoming more costly versus other companies that take a more disciplined or conservative approach. Suppliers also lose faith when given design wins are later cancelled. This has lead to less supply chain prioritization on new designs. Some suppliers favor focusing on Amazon or Google designs due to Meta’s frequent reshuffling.

> Few inside Meta’s chip division have a full understanding of why the company bought Rivos in the first place, and those who championed the deal internally have since gone quiet.

etc etc

It goes into a lot of depth.

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/metas-infrastructure-t...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dominotw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:26AM (#49070197)
he seems to be bullish on meta though and considers muse on slope than an intercept

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-future-of-meta-sup...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mmaunder on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:26AM (#49070192)
Turns out sitting quietly in a room and doing math is worth more than all the money and network in the world.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by anabis on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @03:45AM (#49080671)
I heard Muse Spark 1.1 isn't too shabby. Since Meta compute >> Chinese labs, we'll see how it goes from here.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hneqy2wqls on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:24AM (#49067492)
Good enough is often the right call
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Aboutplants on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:43AM (#49068135)
I don’t need the fastest car to get to where I’m going. I need a car that gets me to where I’m going at the speed I’m comfortable driving at.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by khanhnguyen8386 on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:24AM (#49067498)
Can't wait to run this at 0.02 tokens/sec on my CPU so I can get a response just in time for next month.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mattstir on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:06AM (#49069918)
Unfortunately I don't think modern consumer CPUs are physically capable of addressing enough RAM to even load the model into memory. We'd have to wait for some random person to make an extremely quantized version before we could reach those blazing speeds
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dxxvi on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:25AM (#49067501)
Now I hope that nvidia will host it for free :-)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nateb2022 on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:17AM (#49069295)
if it's anything like the speeds Nvidia Nim puts Deepseek at, it'll probably be 10 tok/s or lower and timeout frequently
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by 2001zhaozhao on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:28AM (#49067514)
I wonder how long it will take for this to get fully decensored and for bad, BAD things to happen
[dead]
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by lotaezenwa on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:48AM (#49068201)
I would like to live in a world where saying a slur is the worst thing I can imagine a computer doing
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bertili on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:43AM (#49067628)
Is there any (near future) technology that would permit burning this terrabyte into some kind of ROM chip?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by davidricodias on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:51AM (#49067676)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bertili on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:57AM (#49067721)
That looks promising! As models become a commodity, this may turn out to be the real AI gold rush.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:53AM (#49069725)
A question of course would be "is 15,000 tok/s Gemini better than 100 tok/s Opus 5"?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by quantumleaper on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:33AM (#49070294)
It's better for the billions of free users that Google serves.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pimeys on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:31AM (#49070270)
Depends what you do. We have certain tasks we spend money on where Gemini 4.6 definitely is better than Opus 5.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by brute on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:43AM (#49068139)
The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086181

You can still try it at https://chatjimmy.ai/, but it's running the rather outdated Llama 3.1 8B

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by antiloper on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:29AM (#49069445)
Given how fast models are improving, burning the weights into actual ROM is prohibitively expensive if you need (or want) to replace the chip every couple of months.

The alternative is on-TPU flash for storing the weights.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:52AM (#49069722)
Yes. We're still a ways off from this being ubiquitous, but I am convinced it's coming.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by TurdF3rguson on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:48AM (#49067657)
FYI huggingface refers to the alien from the Aliens movies that we need to prevent from reaching earth at any cost because it means the end of civilization.

Just checking in because y'all sound good with that.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dools on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:00AM (#49067751)
Doesn’t it refer to the emoji?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by wraptile on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:59AM (#49067744)
haha stupid xenomorphs with their acid blood and pointy bits - all they had to do is make the beasts write code and do our homework :)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by TurdF3rguson on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:20AM (#49067921)
When Gen Z is in charge of security protocols, lol.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Seismark on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @12:34AM (#49079400)
True lol
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by clbrmbr on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:06AM (#49067810)
Funny retcon, but come on… TIL huggingface started as a chatbot for teens who didn’t get enuf hugs.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cpburns2009 on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:38AM (#49070381)
Those are facehuggers.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by apexalpha on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:59AM (#49067738)
This has to be one of the craziest uploads on the internet up until now.

Raw fucking intelligence at your disposal, free to download.

If you'd describe what's happening now to someone from five years ago they'd think you're hallucinating or mad.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by seydor on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:48AM (#49070485)
I think we felt the same when Apache or MySql was releasing back in ancient times.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by bobbyswiss on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:34PM (#49072972)
Apache and Mysql aren't general purpose brains
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by kansm on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:21AM (#49068616)
Wait, so I can download it and run it locally now?? Wow... But it probably won't work on my computer, right?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by loudmax on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:55AM (#49069024)
The short answer is no, it won't work on your home computer. In it's current form it needs something like 594 GB of memory, far outside what you can reasonably run on normal consumer hardware in 2026.

If you have really high end hardware, you might be able to squeeze a heavily quantized version of Kimi-K3 onto your rig, but it will be too slow or too lobotomized to be useful.

This does put a near state-of-the-art open weights model within reach of what a small or medium business could afford if there's a case for local inference. It's probably not as good as Claude Fable or ChatGPT Sol. But if you're an organization that has a genuine need to run inference locally, this is a real possibility.

Is this for your homelab? Not in any practical sense.

Is this a possibility for organizations that can justify $1M or so on hardware for a near SOTA model they have full control over? Yeah, absolutely.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:04AM (#49069136)
The full K3 model will probably be way more than 594GB, that's more of a plausible range for Kimi 2.x. You'll probably be able to test run this model at full or near-full precision using SSD offload, but only at very slow speeds - probably slow enough that you'll be forced to let inferences run overnight or even spanning multiple days. Mind you, that's still useful enough for many casual users, given that they're running a near-SOTA model!
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by 0x1ceb00da on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:30AM (#49069462)
Yes it will. Buy a 4TB nvme, allocate 3TB as swap, and run a gpu emulator on your cpu.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cpburns2009 on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:37AM (#49070367)
I can't imagine a GPU emulator would run better than straight CPU.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by k__ on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:44AM (#49068869)
Right
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mromanuk on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:47AM (#49068905)
Are they going to release Kimi K3.1? I’m eager to test it. According to rumors on X, it could outperform Fable. Could it be the first Chinese open-weight model to become the leading frontier model?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by anonli on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:51AM (#49068959)
Will it work on 4GB of VRAM? /s
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jug on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:05AM (#49069140)
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.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by kamranjon on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:35AM (#49070333)
There is a really interesting startup in Prague that is doing just that. They fine-tuned Qwen 3.6 27b to have 46% fewer reasoning tokens while maintaining most of the performance characteristics. I'm interested to see if they continue down this path of optimizing reasoning for other models.

https://bottlecapai.com/post/thinkingcap-qwen3-6-27b/

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by XCSme on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:09AM (#49069194)
Yeah, they thing forever and doubt everything "wait but" for 200k tokens for almost any question.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by trollbridge on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:49AM (#49069684)
On the flip side, I really like being able to inspect its reasoning chain thoroughly, as opposed to the "black box" that Anthropic models are now.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hectdev on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:08AM (#49070757)
Genuine question, is the reasoning chain different from clicking the status bar under a reply and watching it "think"? Or selecting the "Thinking" transcript view in Claude Code? (both on the desktop app). Seems to me that is very out in the open
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pmxi on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:23AM (#49070984)
That's a summarized and filtered view of the actual reasoning.

OpenAI and Anthropic guard the real reasoning closely. Users have never been able to see it and the API returns an encrypted blob instead of legible reasoning.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hectdev on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:45AM (#49071256)
Got it. Thanks
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by wren6991 on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:46PM (#49072258)
Older models did show the full unredacted thinking trace, but I don't think Opus has ever shown full CoT.

Here is an archived version of Anthropic's API docs saying that Sonnet 3.7 (only) has unredacted CoT on API: https://web.archive.org/web/20260324051339/https://platform....

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pmxi on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @11:42AM (#49098973)
That’s cool. I knew o1 hid it since launch, so I assumed Anthropic would also have never shown it.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by causal on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:08AM (#49069945)
Right I was going to say, no way of knowing whether these issues are unique to Chinese models.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by XCSme on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:11AM (#49069986)
Depends on whether the models report the correct amount of tokens.

5.5 Sol repors 10x fewer reasoning tokens than Kimi k3. If it is correct, than it unlikely has those doubt issues.

At the same time, I feel like their reporting is incorect and we are now paying per "intelligence", not actual tokens. We can't verify it anyway..

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by midnightbobarun on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:11AM (#49069214)
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.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dominotw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:24AM (#49070170)
> (there's even a thread on HN about Opus 5's problems

is opus 5 a flop like 4.8 ?

where is the thread btw curios

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by midnightbobarun on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:09PM (#49072615)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vinhnx on Monday July 27, 2026 @09:21AM (#49069344)
Less than 2 hours left to the Kimi moment. It’s been more than 2 years since the DeepSeek moment that shook the world.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by onesandofgrain on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:33AM (#49070307)
Coreweaves gonna boom
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ltononro on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:01AM (#49069841)
They release it before I could even get a kimi subscription because of waitlist? lol hard to believe that I might get a kimi subscription from a third party
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by gandreani on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:10AM (#49069974)
I just checked and I have it available in opencode go! I just tested it with one message and confirm it works.

It's not practical to use it though. It counts almost 8x more towards your quota than glm 5.2!

https://opencode.ai/docs/go/#usage-limits

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by storus on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:39AM (#49070385)
Getting 404 on the OP's link. Does it mean it got banned or self-censored in the meantime?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by codethief on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:41AM (#49070412)
Until a few minutes ago there was a countdown page. (The weights haven't been released yet.) The countdown should be over in 19min, not sure why we're suddenly getting a 404.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rhdunn on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:55AM (#49070588)
Maybe they are in the process of uploading the weights and git history and have taken down the holding page/project to not have the "coming soon" in the git history.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by craigmart on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:09AM (#49070778)
It's up now
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by llm_nerd on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:43AM (#49070436)
I imagine it's just technical issues on the flip. It's also going to be interesting what happens to HF with loads of people downloading a many TB model. Even though almost no one has the capability to run it, it does seem like something to stash away in case it suddenly becomes unavailable due to government controls.

FWIW, China is suddenly talking about model export controls. It was one thing to release also-ran models, but now that they're pushing SOTA it's a different game.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by qrios on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:56AM (#49070607)
> FWIW, China is suddenly talking about model export controls. ...

Thanks for the hint. It makes sense, even if the main driver for releasing the models is to reduce the market size for the US companies.

Do you have any sources?

Edit: "market size"

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by wren6991 on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:02AM (#49070696)
The main source I'm aware of is this Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-ove...

However you should take it with a pinch of salt because IMO their direct quotations do not support their title.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by apitman on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:56AM (#49070617)
Honestly it's pretty wild that the standard way to download these isn't torrent instead of Hugging Face direct. Why doesn't HF themselves provide torrent links?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by achrono on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:47AM (#49070469)
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, this sounds like a great opportunity to make a statement. US or China, but likelier to be the former. Maybe Clem's on a call with the US government right now?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jorisw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:51AM (#49070537)
The wonderful imagination of the outsider
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by NitpickLawyer on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:02AM (#49070693)
Open source teams have had access to the weights for at least a week now. vLLM folks expect full support on public release of the weights. Anything conspiratorial won't prevent the weights from leaking...

It's just launch day gremlins, like always.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nozzlegear on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:56PM (#49072429)
Who is Clem?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jujube3 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:36PM (#49075828)
You know. Clem.

I've said too much already!

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Anoian on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:40AM (#49070397)
It's 404 now
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by qainsights on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:48AM (#49070490)
Seeing 404
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tonykipkemboi on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:49AM (#49070499)
the page is now throwing a 404 11 minutes out.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by taf2 on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:51AM (#49070527)
it's a 404 link now
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by binyu on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:04AM (#49070707)
Did the link change or anything?

Getting 404 Sorry, we can't find the page you are looking for.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by jorisw on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:11AM (#49070808)
It's up.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by MeProtozoan on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:06AM (#49070732)
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)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by btown on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:17PM (#49071759)
Fireworks' priority tier of Kimi (at $3.75/M vs. Moonshot's $3.00/M) is available on OpenRouter as well. https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#providers

Currently it's showing significantly better latency, but at a fraction of the usage Moonshot is experiencing, so we'll see how that holds up - regardless, a same-day deployment is an impressive feat!

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by pimeys on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:31PM (#49071997)
I've used GLM-5.2 a lot on fireworks and had never ever issues on rate limits. If they cannot handle the load with K3, there's the priority tier to get your evals done.

I'm definitely having full eval suite on already if they get overloaded later on.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by btown on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @12:23AM (#49079326)
Self-replying as this is no longer correct - there are two tiers, one matching Moonshot pricing with comparable latency/throughput, and a fast mode at $4.50/M (still cheaper than Opus) with 3x the throughput.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by tidbeck on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:04PM (#49071552)
Comparing to Opus 5: Claude Opus 5 (Uncached Input $5/M Cached Input $0.50/M Output $25/M) but you also pay a premium on Cache write 25% for 5m and 100% for 1h.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by chrsw on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:13PM (#49071699)
Then there’s the questions of token efficiency and token quality.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fnordpiglet on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:40PM (#49073056)
I have to say cc opus 5 is abysmal. It talks to itself incessantly, gets stuck in minutia, fails to understand problems clearly and makes steering mistakes constantly. It also has a weird behavior where it says “ok I know exactly what to do and I will start now,” then sits waiting for user input. If you’re not on the ball you’re constantly losing 5m/1h cache. Just give me back 4.6.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by veber-alex on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:05PM (#49074882)
I still see Opus 4.6 available in CC.

Also I have been using Opus 5 for the last few days and I find it work fine. It's a little verbose but the code quality is good.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dannyw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:54PM (#49078696)
You can even use /model to use Opus 4.5 if you want. Broadly though I find Opus 5 and most of their point releases (4.7 being the exception) to be excellent and upgrades.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by serial_dev on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:48PM (#49075932)
Fable ends up in a confusion loop for me all the time.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by lmf4lol on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:46PM (#49073975)
I love fireworks.ai! They launched it couple of hours ago and we have it now already live on our platform for our users. Just a shame they deprecated the on-demand flux models :( Where do I get my fix for image gen now?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vunderba on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:49PM (#49074716)
Fal.AI is what I use for running proprietary image models through their paces as part of my GenAI benchmark site. Highly recommended.

https://fal.ai/explore

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by lmf4lol on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:02PM (#49075485)
Hey. Thats looks really cool. Thanks!
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dkersten on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:08PM (#49074255)
Yep, it’s also availability on Together.ai for your sale price. Fireworks and Together were the first places I checked!
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by m00dy on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:08AM (#49070758)
now, it gives 404 lol :)
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by MaskNinja on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:12AM (#49070833)
It’s out now.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by vinhnx on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:14AM (#49070851)
Kimi K3's full weight is now live on Hugging Face https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dilliwal on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:17AM (#49070887)
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.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by gorgmah on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:33AM (#49071100)
good find! This sounds a bit like what Meta was doing with the earlier Llama models?

There is also this paragraph in their licence that is smart marketing-wise:

> 3. If the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of the Licensee's commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, "Kimi K3" must be prominently displayed on the user interface of such product or service.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by whimsicalism on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:48AM (#49071311)
Meta had much higher limits and not restricted merely to token resellers
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mock-possum on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:43AM (#49071223)
Is that even enforceable?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by TheTaytay on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:28PM (#49072869)
I think it is as enforceable as other licenses are.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by cosmojg on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:54PM (#49074087)
IANAL, but probably not, at least not in the United States. Under U.S. copyright law, the weights of machine learning models are excluded from copyright as they are the product of an automated optimization process (e.g., stochastic gradient descent, expectation maximization, genetic algorithms) rather than human authorship. Granted, this has yet to be fully tested in court and going to court is expensive, so it's likely that your employer would prefer to err on the side of caution and respect such attempts at model licensing anyway. Nonetheless, this was partially tested last year in Thaler v. Perlmutter which affirmed that copyright requires human authorship, reading the Copyright Act's provisions on ownership, duration, and transferability as presupposing a human author[1].

If you want to assess the position of the U.S. Copyright Office for yourself, the relevant text can be found in the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 313.2, "Works That Lack Human Authorship"[2], which states:

> […] the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.

> […] the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, REPORT TO THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS BY THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS 5 (1965).

Oh, and there's also a bit in the following Section 313.3, "Works That Do Not Constitute Copyrightable Subject Matter"[2], which explicitly excludes mathematical principles, formulas, algorithms, and equations, along with DNA sequences and other genetic or chemical compounds, regardless of whether they are produced by humans or by nature. If one takes the perspective that machine learning models are algorithms, the conclusions on copyrightability are pretty clear.

[1] https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/03/23-523...

[2] https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hnfong on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:39PM (#49074618)
If your argument is true, what would make LLM weights not copyrightable, but compiled code copyrightable?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Imustaskforhelp on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:05PM (#49074889)
(IANAL), but the argument would be the same because how compiled code (binary data) is copyrightable but the code (binary data) of an image of a painting created by say a monkey itself with no human involvement isn't.

As such as they have mentioned in the argument, their argument is sound in terms of the level of human involvement in creation of the artifact.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by embedding-shape on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:13PM (#49074326)
Before figuring that out, could Facebook take you to court in order to argue their case that it is enforceable, and thereby forcing you to get lawyers and be distracted by the preparation and all that comes with this?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Imustaskforhelp on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:17PM (#49075014)
Nothing stops anybody from suing anybody else (and maybe even winning) though. What Napster was doing in isolate was just a technology yet RIAA and others sued and the lawsuit had led to the conclusion that the tech could be held reliable and if what users were doing were an intentional known to the tech-creators.

So the mere knowing of it led them to lose it and Napster died because of that but also the actual nail in the coffin was that they couldn't significantly do anything to the problem about that given its P2P nature, Ipods were around the same time and RIAA was a bit afraid of that too but Steve jobs assured them that because of the walled garden they could better control the piracy issue and have proper ways of countering it.

Now aside from the interesting details of that time I showed, coming to my main point, Lawsuits can sometimes happen for lesser reasons than or just limited to plain and simple license violations and if a company is earning 20 Million dollars supposing so, then they might also have a really good lawyer insurance package and could lawyer up just as well.

The core argument lies on proving if AI weights are copyrightable or not from my understanding because the licenses could be best applied under copyright material not public domain materials and the other discussion[0] by @cosmojg shows the most likely cases of AI not being copyrightable?, so you would have to prove if AI is copyrightable or not.

Now that would be a fun lawsuit to watch though.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074087

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dannyw on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:50PM (#49078674)
What's wrong with it? Licenses like the MIT license already requires you to attribute, the only difference is the "prominent" part.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by biztos on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @12:06AM (#49079214)
If you put a layer between the customer and the LLM, a la ChatGPT/Claude, are you a Model-as-a-Service business? I think you are not.

But then how thick does that layer need to be?

I think the real win from these models is enabling well-funded/profitable companies to not be beholden to the big closed-weight providers. But I like the idea of letting a hundred flowers bloom for under $20M/y each.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by kiproping on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:17AM (#49070898)
From a cursory glance on huggingface, the files don't add up to 2+TB. Unless it adds up to that when you extract the multiple ~17GB files, if that's the case then that's some crazy compression.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zozbot234 on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:21AM (#49070955)
If it's 4-bit native for the sparse parameters (which is the bulk of them) why would you expect it to add up to 2+TB?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by 3uler on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:21AM (#49070962)
American dates are sooo fucking annoying…
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fahrradflucht on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:23AM (#49070979)
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.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by taf2 on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:23AM (#49070982)
404 is resolved let the downloads begin
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by walrus01 on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:31AM (#49071072)
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.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by clint on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:00PM (#49072477)
There's a 2bit quant on HF already at ~1TB
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by starcast2026 on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:55AM (#49071410)
I wondering if folks like OpenAI & Anthropic start supporting open models in their api. After some time, keeping users stuck is going to be more important than "models"
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by great_psy on Monday July 27, 2026 @12:04PM (#49071559)
What grip do they have then ? Is Claude code and the suite of other interface that good compared to open source/ competitor offering ?
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by spwa4 on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:28PM (#49072873)
So, in normal parlance this is a 2.8T-A104B model at MXFP4 (weight) * MXFP8 (activations)

Perhaps let's call it Kimi-K3-2.8T-A104B to make matters clear.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fnordpiglet on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:55PM (#49073251)
I suggest downloading these frontier models just to have a copy; even though it’s 1.5TB, it’s worth sticking in a cheap disk and putting aside. Seeding torrents would be even more useful. The man is coming to lock these down, like they tried to do with encryption algorithms. The only way open software survives regulation is through distribution.

Over time the enormous investment in techniques and hardware manufacturing will almost certainly make these runnable in a more practical way. It will be a shame if by the time we get there it’s illegal to distribute them and you have to pay a reg capture premium and feed the machine.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nancyminusone on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:58PM (#49073296)
they will just restrict you from buying the hardware these run on
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Aboutplants on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:03PM (#49074199)
The rising price of hardware is already doing just that
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by fnordpiglet on Saturday August 01, 2026 @09:06PM (#49140099)
Economics says the hardware required and the scale of hardware available at what price will converge to meet demand
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by 93po on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:45PM (#49074674)
Or more likely, put regulations in place so the hardware can only run allowed models/allows surveillance of what's run. They're already doing stuff like this for 3D printers.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by mvdtnz on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:03PM (#49073352)
There's no such thing as cheap disk anymore and I'm not spending hundreds of dollars out of paranoia of "the man".
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ClumsyPilot on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:45PM (#49075913)
Well it’s now illegal to make cars that don’t spy on you

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Properly_Paranoid

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hemant6488 on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:28PM (#49075756)
Here: https://terminalbytes.com/kimi-k3-torrent/Kimi-K3.torrent

Magnet:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:1e63a865fbf9b58decc8b71091db54d673c5da6f&dn=Kimi-K3&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.stealth.si%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3A451%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969%2Fannounce

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by minimaltom on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:55PM (#49073254)
HF says activation function is "SiTU-GLU", but I can't find any info on that?

Anyone know / is this a typo?

Even the python code for inference seems to use normal activations.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by lightningdev1 on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:04PM (#49073355)
It stands for Sigmoid Tanh Unit Gated Linear Unit. Check the tech report/paper (page 7): https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3/blob/main/k3_tech_repo...
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by minimaltom on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:12PM (#49074958)
Thanks! I had a clanker graph it with sliders, its a very interesting function to play with! seems like it has the negative 'hump' typical of a GELU coupled with the saturation of a sigmoid.

Its interesting that saturation is ideal at this scale, i thought we were all in on self-activating functions (i.e. swish) but in fairness all those papers lacked ablations at scale nor discussion of stability.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by wojciem on Monday July 27, 2026 @01:56PM (#49073269)
I am impressed to see already couple of providers serving Kimi-K3 on openrouter: https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by minraws on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:09PM (#49073424)
After going through the license and trying out the model on some hardware, I don't think it will ever will be 60-70% cheaper than the price Moonshot is offering from providers, it be marginally lower sure but discounts we saw with GLM seem hard unless tps is put into the ground.

In my testing it seems like Kimi has a healthy margin (I would wager 40-50% if they are renting GPUs at full marked up prices, a bunch more otherwise, given their tps, but I don't know which GPUs they are on and what they consider margins and if they own them) but definitely not the claimed 90%+ margins of Anthropic (honestly I am suspicious of even 80% API margins for Anthropic) as I have seen some people posit. If it was just electricity costs I could bet it could be 80-90% though otherwise it seems rough given the TPS they offer.

I would love if someone has access to those super secret R100s could try it, and tell us if it's significantly cheaper since I think immediate memory optimizations seem hard since I am already on a quantised model. And not even using 1M context.

All I had access to was B200(couldn't find a B300). I am certain people could optimize it a lot better but Kimi also wants some kind of contract for big providers so I think we shouldn't imagine any significant discounts while Kimi is the top open model around.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by latent-9 on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:20PM (#49073571)
i try kimi k3 for build ascii art ant calligram and than amazing result
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by capec0d on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:22PM (#49073615)
It's available on DigitalOcean as of today if anyone wants to give it a shot at $3/$15/$0.6 per MTok.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by rushingcreek on Monday July 27, 2026 @02:35PM (#49073821)
Many people are talking about price, but I think that the most interesting aspect of this release, by far, is customization.

Any startup can download the weights, tinker with them, and fine-tune them. The real win here isn't necessarily cost, but performance on your data and IP sovereignty. It's a huge win. Kudos to the Kimi team.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by otterley on Monday July 27, 2026 @11:55PM (#49079137)
Who does this, though? I'm truly curious.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Aeroi on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:24PM (#49075078)
"Native Multimodality & Long Context: Kimi K3 understands text, images, and video within the same model, and supports a 1-million-token context window."

Video will be interesting. It's the most context rich medium combined with sound, movement ect. We need more evals and benchmarks around video understanding. It's the key to unlocking truly great physical intelligence. I've been working a bit on this @camerasearch and its challenging.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by holoduke on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:38PM (#49075205)
I am going to create a uncensored version of this one. Looking forward to design my own meth lab at home. Just kidding. But also not kidding. I like uncensored versions
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by dmrivers on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:47PM (#49075315)
Attention replaced recurrence over tokens in 2017, this does the same over depth of the layers. It's apparently not an entirely new idea, but also an elegant reapplication of the attention mechanism.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ataoz on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:57PM (#49076001)
I asked "Tell me about yourself" on HF. This is the response... Curious.

> Kimi K3:

I'm Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic. I'm built to be helpful with a wide range of tasks—things like writing and editing, answering questions, coding, analysis, brainstorming, explaining concepts, math, and creative projects.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by awesomeusername on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:12PM (#49076816)
I did the same:

I’m Kimi, an AI assistant developed by Moonshot AI (月之暗面). I can help with questions, writing, coding, analysis, and more.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by nullbio on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:45PM (#49077206)
This really means nothing.

You can ask the same thing in Chinese to Opus and it will tell you it's DeepSeek, for example.

Things leak into the training data and models hallucinate.

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by sam345 on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @01:29AM (#49093732)
I don't think so.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by zackwu on Monday July 27, 2026 @07:05PM (#49076729)
Is it surprising? Let's face it - distillation is common practice and every lab does it either intentionally or unintentionally (your training corpus always includes AI generated content in the post ChatGPT era).
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by potsandpans on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:08PM (#49076104)
.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by ataoz on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:10PM (#49076121)
I would expect Kimi to say that "I am Kimi etc..." :D
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by w4yai on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @07:00AM (#49082082)
As repeated many, many times, models usually don't know about their own name. Claude thinks he's ChatGPT, ChatGPT thinks he's DeepSeek, and Kimi thinks he's Claude. Nothing interesting to see here. Google it.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by hiherer on Monday July 27, 2026 @06:24PM (#49076242)
> omg this AI tells me it's another AI!!!1

grow up

Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by Recoordinates on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:11PM (#49078395)
The release itself is great news, but I'm even more interested in the ecosystem that forms around it. Open weight models tend to improve much faster once people start building inference stacks, quantizations, evaluation suites, and fine tunes. It'll be interesting to see where Kimi-K3 stands in six months compared to today's benchmarks.
Re:Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27 by aiagenta2z on Monday July 27, 2026 @10:38PM (#49078596)
Kimi K3 models are strong in coding and some abilities at a reasonable price. Nice job!