The dark side of the moon is the release of Kimi K3 on July 16. This open-source weight model, which is of a size of 2.8 trillion, is described in the article as outstanding in writing, front-end code and partial integrated assessments. The model weights are expected to be made public on July 27th, with a modified MIT license.
Baseline performance
The article cites several third-party lists, according to which Kimi K3 exceeded Claude Fable 5 in the writing class and received first on the front-end list. With regard to the composite index, its scores were slightly lower than those of Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol but remained in the first tier.
Pricing and capacity
The API price for Kimi K3 is token 3 per million, token 15 per million, the same as Claude Sonet 5. According to the article, this allowed it to maintain the price level of the intermediate model while approaching the front-line model performance.
Training and constraints
The article also mentioned that Kimi K3 uses a hybrid expert structure to support a million token context windows with image and video understanding capabilities. At the same time, its hallucinogenic rate has increased in comparison with previous generations, and official documents suggest that it may be too proactive in long missions.