The Kimi K3 Moment

Article URL: https://stephen.bochinski.dev/blog/2026/07/18/the-kimi-k3-moment/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960218

Points: 603

# Comments: 587

Hacker News 讨论

603 points · 587 comments · 查看原帖

1. nickysielicki

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

2. montroser

   This was always where this was heading, but we got here much faster than expected. Once western governments declare it to be a "national security" risk for citizens to have access to open-weight frontier models, and once they classify using these models as acts of terrorism, what will that world be like? Will using Kimi K3 come to be like how napster was in the olden days? Everybody knew it was technically illegal, but come on -- any track at your fingertips? But surveillance is quite more evolved now. Or it will be like cannabis, where a guy in the neighborhood will low key rent you metered access to the 8x5090 rig in his basement he cobbled together from parts on ebay? Or everyone will flock to VPNs? Or will the oppressors actually succeed? The same way that napster is long gone, and everyone accepts that they must pay spotify for a homogenized collection, where artists must take only

3. SwellJoe

   I tried Kimi K3 on a task I've done with every other model I use regularly ( https://swelljoe.com/post/i-let-every-agent-implement-its-ow... ) and found it chewed a lot longer on the problem and ate up almost the entirety of a 5 hour usage limit on their $19 plan. I only have the $20 plan from OpenAI and the same task, with a lot of the same implementation details as Kimi Code, only took a few minutes and consumed almost none of the 5 hour limit. Subscription usage limits are hard to measure as none of the providers tell you directly what it means in terms of tokens or anything else you can easily compare, but when I sat down to add Kimi Code to flar, it was because I wanted to try it on some real work and then couldn't do any, because usage was nearly gone after the trivial task...no other ~$20 subscription I have has felt that tight before. So, it was really slow to complete the task a

4. aliasxneo

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

5. credit_guy

   I think it's the opposite. Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters. We don't know the number of parameters of ChatGPT 5.6 or Opus 4.8, but it's probably in the same region. Fable/Mythos are rumored to be around 10 trillion. So, K3 is directly comparable with ChatGPT 5.6 and Opus 4.8, and the price is not so much lower: K3: $3/$15 per 1 Mtok input/output ChatGPT 5.6 Sol: $5/$30 Opus 4.8: $5/$25 This is not a watershed moment. It's a competitor converging to the same capability and trying to undercut your prices, but not by a lot. As for the open weights? For now, Kimi K3's weights are closed, and I don't expect the situation would change.

6. thedreammachine

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

7. jwr

   Well, there is the small issue of privacy policy: Kimi will train their models on your interactions if you use their subscriptions, and only with direct API usage (billed at API prices) they say they won't. Whether you trust that is another matter. Those things do make a difference to some of us, even though nothing is black and white. In my case, I'll probably want to wait until other providers appear through OpenRouter and then I'll try to judge how much I trust them. But even if I don't trust them much, they don't train models anyway, so the likelihood of my data being used that way is smaller.

8. boogerlad

   > I’ve been running Kimi K3 alongside Claude on my normal coding work, and for all practical purposes I can’t tell them apart When you say "Claude", do you mean Opus? Fable? What effort level?