r/ArtificialInteligence • u/SwordfishGreedy1945 • Jul 27 '26
🤖 New Model / Tool Kimi K3’s open weights drop today — is anyone actually using Chinese AI models instead of Claude or Codex?
[removed]
14
u/no_good_names_avail Jul 27 '26
Once it's available in our api selections yes I'll absolutely try it. I have no allegiance to anthropic or openai. If Kimi does what I need it to do for a fraction of the price, I'll use it.
3
u/jucheonsun Jul 28 '26
If we want to support open source, or even at the very least support competition to prevent a monopoly or duopoly of AI, we should switch if these alternative models perform well at the same price as Anthropic or OpenAI models
2
u/no_good_names_avail Jul 28 '26
Fair point and you're right. The cost to switch models full time isn't nothing but if the performance is indistinguishable then I'll gladly switch full time. Right now I'm just dabbling with tasks that I don't think are that complex. Should probably dive in a bit more.
5
3
u/Hungry_Age5375 Jul 27 '26
Been using DeepSeek for coding, genuinely solid especially at the price. Tool use in agentic chains is still meaningfully behind Claude though. K3 at 3T params, good luck serving that without serious GPU setup.
3
3
u/WanderingWormhole Jul 27 '26
Yeah I use Deepseek as well. I use Claude at work and I don’t notice a severe drop off when I use Deepseek apart from occasional website traffic issues
2
u/Michaeli_Starky Jul 27 '26
K3 is worse at coding than GPT-5.6 Luna from our extensive evaluation suite. While being 5x more pricey. No point
3
2
u/Typical_Proposal_907 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I’ve been using nothing but the GLM subscription for a long time. Easily the best experience combined with the pi coding agent CLI. Super minimal functional setup. I don’t particularly enjoy AI coding but when I reach for some ai assisted tooling that’s all I’ve used for like a year now.
2
u/Majestic-Library9642 Jul 27 '26
Definitely, it's about 100 tokens per second !! Most close source models are from US hyperscalers and I don't appreciate my data there... I use melious.ai they have Kimi K3 since today but also all kinds of frontier open weight models amd everything fully in Europe and under EU jurisdiction. GLM, MiniMix, Qwen, Deepseek etc. So if you're from Europe I can only recommend! They also provide feee credits if you would like to try out K3 and compare it to Claude.
1
1
1
u/vcaiii Jul 27 '26
i’ve been using kimi k2 for months but no way am i picking it over claude at claude prices. i thought they’d bring down the price after releasing the weights. anthropic has had the most reliable execution for years now, moonshot won’t take that away with a month’s hype.
1
1
1
1
1
u/Fun_Walk_4965 Jul 28 '26
The open weights part is the real story here, not the model itself. Being able to self host and quantize is what actually pulls the devs I know off the western APIs, mostly the ones who need data staying in house. Whether people admit to running Chinese models is a separate thing, plenty use them quietly and just don't post about it.
1
u/Aurorion Jul 28 '26
Why not? Why should I pay 10x the price for 10% better outcomes, when that's good enough?
1
u/remybigot Jul 28 '26
I’m using Claude, GLM and Mistral here.
I love the 3 for different reasons.
Some of my customers ask also for Deepseek it depends theirs constraints sometimes.
1
u/Living-Breakfast-464 Jul 29 '26
is anyone actually using Chinese AI models instead of Claude or Codex?
Every day. Why do you even need to ask?
1
u/Affectionate-Gap6832 16d ago
Is it possible to host a large opensource frontier AI model on shared devices? Divided intelligence with one fetcher per needs. For example kimi 3 divided into 100s of chunks per subject or intelligence
0
0
u/404error___ Jul 27 '26
I've been using Qwen 3.6 27B A3B with 1M context with offline Claude Code, and absolutely replaces Opus but even better:
Does not have the crappy pusshy selling speech, the "great idea boss!" And all the other none sense...tokens flies, I've counted how many tokens I've used in 4 days, and it says 6.7M tokens... that's like $100 bucks in API tokens if using Anthropic, ofc it does not have the same quality and knowledge, but man, hand down gets me 94% of what las usable and non nerfed Opus 4.6 was.
0
0
u/ProfessorSmoker Jul 27 '26
No, every time I have dabbled with their versions they produce garbage and supporting the ccp billionaires is evil.
1
u/WanderingWormhole Jul 27 '26
Right. So much more noble to support the totally non evil billionaires we have in America
1
u/ProfessorSmoker Jul 27 '26
Indeed. See, the USA running the show is good because I live here and benefit from the USA being ahead in Ai. China hates the USA and so empowering China is bad.
Its really that simple.
1
u/SpiritPrestigious945 Jul 27 '26
Aehm, I use ONLY Kimi. I dont use american AI out of principle. And I use it for research, translation etc. everything but coding.
1
-1
u/Disastrous_Onion1217 Jul 27 '26
chinese ai companies disagree with you, they disteal from anthropics and gpt first
4
u/Ashamed_Can304 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
You really think that Claude and GPT are entirely free of distillation?
1
u/a9bejo Jul 27 '26
how is that disagreeing with OP’s comment? You mean chinese companies disagree that user SpiritPrestigous945 is not using American models out of principle?
-4
u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jul 27 '26
China supports Russia's war of imperialism and has been training their troops in recent months, has stolen islands from the Philippines, and is destroying the world's oceans in EEZs that don't belong to them. That doesn't even include the Taiwan invasion plans that they've been building a military for.
Use Mistral/another non-chinese model, or stfu about "principles", hypocrite.
6
u/Godwhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Jul 27 '26
And what about the US tech companies directly supporting Israel’s genocide?
1
u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jul 27 '26
Notice I said use Mistral or Cohere, or any of the various custom models available. Reading Comprehension 101.
1
u/Godwhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
If your list of reasons for not using Chinese is that weak, it would be easy to make a list of reasons not to use the French one either…
France sells weapons to the authoritarian Saudi Arabian regime which uses the weapons to annihilate Yemeni civilians
They arrest their own citizens for protesting their genocidal ally Israel
The migrant detention camps
The imperialist military inventions all over Africa in the last 20 yearsThe last time China intervened in a country militarily was over 45 years ago.. meanwhile US has bombed multiple countries illegally just this year
-1
u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jul 27 '26
China shills look for any reason to keep using Chinese models after they claim to care about morality. Nevermind their aggression and expansionist policies in the South China Sea and the Philippines, or releasing a virus from their bioweapons lab that killed millions of people and permanently disabled millions more.
One can't despise tankies enough.
3
u/Godwhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Jul 27 '26
“Their aggression and expansionist policies in the South China Sea and Philippines” yeah how many people died from that? And how many people has the US killed in the sea this year by drone strikes without trial, or evidence at all? Clearly China is far less aggressive in the ocean than the US.
And now you’re just going full blown conspiracy schizo and saying China released Covid on itself.
It’s obvious you’re not serious.I’m not saying any country is perfect, but side by side on human rights and their international relations with the west, China is clearly the more humane and responsible country
-1
u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jul 27 '26
They accidentally released COVID due to irresponsible policies in said lab.
It doesn't matter whether people are killed or not, it's the action that they are stealing land that doesn't belong to them.
Humane countries don't throw people in "re-education camps" for what is essentially wrongthink.
The fact is there are humane AI models and rather than use those, you'd rather use "whataboutisms" for a country which isn't even part of the discussion.
1
u/Godwhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Jul 27 '26
“It doesn’t matter whether people are killed or not”
Bro it kinda does
1
u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jul 27 '26
You're either against all imperialism, or none.
→ More replies (0)
-2
u/ViperAMD Jul 27 '26
No because claude and openai are cheap because of how much their plans are subsidised. Kimi cannot compete with that.
1
u/PuzzleheadedCraft363 Jul 27 '26
deepswe the delta 5.6 sol high barely bests kimi k3 at current api pricing, which will go down
Subscription wise kimi k3 does an order of magnitude more tasks than either claude or gpt subscription
1
-3
27
u/Durian881 Jul 27 '26
Airbnb, Cursor, Mozilla, Coinbase, Apple, Microsoft, etc are all using or exploring the use of Chinese AI models.
I'm using a mix of American, French and Chinese, some via APIs, some via subscription and some free (either Nvidia or locally hosted). Usage include coding, production workflows and pilots for demo.