Kimi releases K3 weights with 2.78T parameters, 1M context, and a new commercial license
AGI Hunt · wechat · 2026-07-28
Kimi has released the weights for K3, positioning it as the largest open-weight model so far.
- K3 uses 2.78T total parameters with 104.2B activated, 16 of 896 experts active, a 1M-token context window, and native vision.
- It ships under a new KimiK3License, not MIT. Commercial MaaS usage requires a separate agreement, and apps over $20M monthly revenue or 100M users must visibly show “KimiK3”.
- Official and third-party API pricing is aligned at $3 per 1M input tokens and $15 per 1M output tokens, which appears designed to prevent price undercutting.
- The MXFP4 weights are 1.4–1.5TB, too large for 8×A100 or 8×H200 nodes; 8×B300 is the first single-node setup that can fit them.
- Benchmarks and estimates suggest K3 is cheaper per token on tasks like BrowseComp than GPT-5.6Sol and far cheaper than Fable5.
- The report does not disclose training tokens or FLOPs, but estimates put training above 2e25 FLOPs and possibly 3–4e25, making it likely the largest model trained in China.
- The model card notes weaknesses: reasoning traces may be cut off by agent frameworks, it may act too quickly in ambiguous situations, and its chat quality still lags Fable5 and Sol despite close benchmark scores.
- The piece also frames K3 as a possible “fabless” model business model: free for self-use, but cloud service commercialization requires revenue sharing.
Related event: Kimi K3 shifts attention from scale to architecture(25 posts)→
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