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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you sign up with non-Chinese phone number, you're bucketed into US, you get US prices, can pay only in USD and with American credit card network.

Chinese prices are about 9x cheaper than the US prices, which are already far cheaper than Claude or other American provider. If you can somehow get hold of a Chinese phone number, keep in mind that you can save ~90% of the bill.

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.

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

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.

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

Is anyone using open source models for anything major ?

I don't understand how a product that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But damn Moonshot.

Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notice the trick here?

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

Where is the Fable-class Kimi model at all?