China’s AI scene just took another big step forward with the launch of Moonshot AI’s latest model, Kimi K3.
The Chinese AI company has released what it claims is the largest AI model to date with open weights, packing 2.8 trillion parameters.
Moonshot is calling it frontier-level, and they plan to release the full model weights soon, meaning developers and enthusiasts will eventually be able to download, run, and fine-tune it locally.
For now, you can already try K3 through the Kimi app on iOS and Android, the kimi.com website, or the Kimi Work desktop app. No developer account is needed to get started on the free tier (though there are usage limits).
K3 uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, activating 16 out of 896 experts per request. It comes with some serious specs: a 1-million-token context window, native support for images (and reportedly video), and clever tricks like Kimi Delta Attention for handling long conversations efficiently.
Early benchmarks show it’s competitive. It trails some of the absolute top Western models like Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 in certain areas, but beats or matches others in tasks like coding, agentic workflows, and knowledge work. Independent tests from Artificial Analysis put it in a strong position overall.
API pricing starts at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens (with caching discounts). Moonshot says the full open weights will drop on July 27. That’s a huge deal for anyone interested in self-hosting or customizing the model. The company admits K3 still has some catching up to do in overall user experience, but it’s a big leap for China’s AI ecosystem.
If you’re curious about high-end AI development outside the usual Western players, Kimi K3 is worth checking out, especially once the weights are released later this month. It could spark a lot more experimentation and competition in the open-source community.
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(Kimi)
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