Article URL: https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938607 Points: 7 # Comments: 1

Today, we are introducing Kimi K3 — our most capable model. Kimi K3 is a 2.8T-parameter model built on our Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native vision capabilities and a 1-million-token context window. It is the world's first open 3T-class model, designed for frontier intelligence across long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning. While its overall performance still trails the most powerful proprietary models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol, Kimi K3 demonstrated frontier-level performance across our evaluation suite, consistently outperforming other tested models. Kimi K3 is available today on Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API. At launch, Kimi K3 will use max thinking effort by default, with low- and high-effort modes to be introduced in subsequent updates. We are currently working closely with inference partners and open-source maintainers to align technical details and ensure a reliable rollout across the ecosystem. The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026. Further details on the architecture, training, and evaluations will be released alongside the Kimi K3 technical report. Kimi K3 is the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It marks the latest step in Kimi's sustained push at the scaling frontier: for nine of the past twelve months, Kimi models have set the upper bound of open-model sizes. Kimi K3 is built on Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), two architectural updates designed to improve how information flows across sequence length and model depth. We have also scaled up Mixture of Experts (MoE) sparsity, effectively activating 16 out of 896 experts when paired with a Stable LatentMoE framework. Together with refined training and data recipes, these structural changes yield an approximate 2.5× improvement in overall scaling efficiency compared to Kimi K2, allowing the model to convert compute into intelligence more effectively. Kimi K3 has strong long-horizon coding performance. Operating with minimal human oversight, it can sustain long engineering sessions, navigate massive repositories, and orchestrate terminal tools. Kimi K3 also excels in tasks blending software engineering with visual reasoning — it leverages screenshots and visuals to optimize game dev, frontend, and CAD. The case studies below show how Kimi K3's coding capability translates into open-ended software creation and scientific research.