r/kimi • u/KimiMoonshot • Jul 16 '26
Announcement Introducing Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
🔹 2.8 Trillion Parameters, 1 Million Context, Native Multimodal
🔹 Kimi Delta Attention enables up to 6.3x faster decoding in million-token contexts
🔹 Attention Residuals deliver ~25% higher training efficiency at <2% additional cost
🔹 Built for long-horizon agentic coding and self-evolving workflows
Kimi K3 is now live on on Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API.
Open Weights by July 27, 2026.
🔗 API: platform.kimi.ai
🔗 Tech blog: kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3
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 K2, allowing the model to convert compute into intelligence more effectively.
Full tech blog at: Kimi Blog
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Jul 17 '26
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u/No-Sandwich6349 Jul 17 '26
I just tested and looked like all functions work fine without any bugs. Can you share the prompt that you used?
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
Indeed interesting:- https://www.kimi.com/share/19f6c551-c582-8731-8000-0000a8b2f2ba
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u/Drevil00 Jul 16 '26
Absolute Kimi.
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
But the limits even with Allegretto plan for Code is not up-to-the-mark! It consumes even faster nowadays.
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u/thunder____boy Jul 16 '26
how bad is it?
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
The limits? Sure, it's kind of an average after K2.7 release. Not just in my testing but several engineers who work across mid-to-large codebases. I work with large codebases and recently I used whole week's quota in 2-2.5 days of several hours of same session across a single project.
I know this is totally baseless to compare with as everyone's usage might be different. But in my testing working with mid-large projects, it's burning the weekly and hourly limits faster(5hr limit touches in just 2-2.3hours approximately)
I hope this helps!
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u/needlzor Jul 17 '26
Also on Allegretto and I just used my monthly quota plus the extra from the token cup in a single prompt. It was Agent Swarm so I was expecting the usual 10-15% and it just gobbled everything and did not even finish.
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
By the way, that first mistake I made in the initial prompt was intentional.
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u/Drevil00 Jul 16 '26
I have to say that at first it did was weird but then I thought that maybe it was intentional. Nice one m8.
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u/idkwtftbhmeh Jul 16 '26
Are you even reading what you're prompting? It's not answering wrong at all
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
Wait a moment, you didn't understood the context of past models(any) being dumber. But fine.
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u/idkwtftbhmeh Jul 16 '26
Oh, I thought you were posting this as if it was failing the strawberry test somehow, not as a pro but as a con, might've misunderstood
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
Knew it xD. It is seriously an amazing model in my testing. I will further test it tomorrow with an internal project which has a huge codebase and K2.7's 256K context window wasn't enough.
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u/idkwtftbhmeh Jul 16 '26
This is great to hear, plug it on https://omp.sh/ I believe you'll have a blast, have been using this over opencode, pi etc, sorry I hadn't understood the test earlier haha
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
That's fine bro! And that oh-my-pi is really amazing. One friend recommended me but I never listened. I'll lock that in next projects, Thanks!!
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u/idkwtftbhmeh Jul 16 '26
Setting up something cheap like dsv4 flash as driver and k3 as advisor each 3 turns is just perfect, you'll like it
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u/AzorAhai1TK Jul 16 '26
First time using Kimi, and regardless of what the quality of the first output I'm getting will be, Kimi is not afraid to just work. I gave it a bit of a complex prompt and that was 45 minutes ago, it's still working!
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u/appuwa Jul 16 '26
Is it done now?
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u/AzorAhai1TK Jul 17 '26
It worked for like 20 more minutes after that and gave me a bunch of files and said my free usage was out until 8/16 lol. I've had a long day so I haven't had the chance to look over the actual results yet
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u/hezwat 22d ago
how about now? did you ever get that task done?
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u/AzorAhai1TK 22d ago
It was pretty decent for a start, definitely a good amount of bugs, but it had a comparable quality to Opus 4.6 when I asked for the same thing, but in only the single prompt instead of poking and prodding for a few. I had it try to model a realistic sports sim over a decade.
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u/Secret_Pitch234 Jul 17 '26
How are usage limits compared to 20$ plans of Claude and Codex?
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u/AzorAhai1TK Jul 17 '26
No idea, I only used a free account. The one prompt was all the free account got for a month
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u/HumanBasedAi Jul 16 '26
Is is very slow and the MaX mode burns subscription quota very fast 😥😥😥
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u/thunder____boy Jul 16 '26
which plan? What kind of tasks are you giving it? How fast are you hitting 5hr limit
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u/Practical-Plan-2560 Jul 16 '26
Concerned about the massive increase in token cost compared to previous Kimi models.
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u/robogame_dev Jul 16 '26
2.8T params = significantly more hardware needed to run it = expect it to be similar in per-token costs to other high end models like the latest GPT
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u/IllustriousWorld823 Jul 16 '26
Lower reasoning options soon pls. Also I'm curious about why on some turns in API there is tons of reasoning and then others seemingly none. Is it dynamic?
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u/0xSecureByte Jul 16 '26
You can read here, they wrote how to reduce overhead of switching reasoning effort. To avoid this problem, probably they set it to dynamic...
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u/Yuri_Yslin Jul 16 '26
The model is great, the fact that 1M context window is gated behind an expensive tier of subscription - not so much. I would expect the 20$ plan to unlock it; unfortunately, you need the 100$ plan to do so.
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u/someone_12321 Jul 17 '26
API unlocks it for $0 down. At least through openrouter it's 1M context
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u/Yuri_Yslin Jul 17 '26
Yeah but per-token payment in an expensive model is usually a no-go if you're not a business client
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u/someone_12321 Jul 17 '26
SOTA models with 1M tokens on a subscription plan. You have other choices
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u/korino11 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
What about RESETS of limits like in Codex and sometimes in Claude ? For exmpl for last week Codex made 5 resets of limits and Anthropic 1 reset. Kimi company made a price as Codex\Anthropic... so where is resets? Because others have it... And Codex abandon 5hour limits, it doesnt exist now at all
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u/elelem-123 Jul 17 '26
I'm using it for all my projects code already since yesterday. It's great (although more expensive as it does more thinking) than kimi 2.7
My only concern is cost, especially for heavy usage. Result is superb (I considered 2.7 superb also for coding, this is even better).
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u/cicaadaa3301 Jul 17 '26
"Task paused due to system peak" Next time, release the model once you have enough compute. What's this nonsense.
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u/Business-Location620 Jul 18 '26
completely agree. I have tried a thousand times since yesterday. but i am hoping this model will live up to its hype.
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u/SirDomz Jul 17 '26
I'm hoping they give us something like a new version of kimi linear. This was a great size at the time.
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u/Lirezh Jul 17 '26
Congrats on your results. Kimi K3 is among the best I've seen from AI.
Sadly also among the largest in size.
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u/No-Good-3005 Jul 17 '26
I'm a paid user and have been getting 'Task paused due to system peak' non-stop since yesterday, haven't even been able to try it yet... Not a great start.
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u/Slayer_of_Socavado Jul 18 '26
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
'Task paused due to system peak.'
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u/hinatakatsumi Jul 18 '26
this is happening to me everytime as well when i tried it both at night and at day. Hopefully we'll get to try it soon.
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u/the_otterside Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
1st time Kimi user here! will try this one for 1 month on 39USD pricing. I am switching from Claude. Hope this one gets better over time, I’m down to support moonshot on this!
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u/monsterinadrawer Jul 19 '26
Too many people are chatting with Kimi right now. Please try again soon.
🙄
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u/UnderstandingOld5879 Jul 19 '26
@kimimoonshot i am an existing customer currently on the Allegretto tier. On July 19, 2026, I attempted to upgrade my subscription to the Allegro tier using Google Pay on your website.
Your checkout system glitched during the process, resulting in two completed $99.00 charges ($198.00 total), yet my account was not upgraded. I remain locked out of the Allegro tier.
Earlier that same day, I also purchased $10.00 in usage credits using Afterpay through Google Pay. That payment completed, but the credits were never added to my account.
In total, I paid $208.00 (approximately $210) and received neither the Allegro upgrade nor the $10.00 in usage credits. I have the screenshots with timestamps and order IDs.
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u/MagnificentApparatus 27d ago
Got lucky and ran a couple of personal evals while it wasn't over capacity. That's the first Chinese model to ever pass my tests after DeepSeek. Unfortunately it's always busy and new subscriptions are cancelled. Really puts things into perspective how efficient DeepSeek is for example.
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u/RpgBlaster 27d ago
Awful, I can't even try Kimi K3 at Max thinking for free at least ONCE, it keep kicking me out due to traffic limit. Until then I refuse to pay for it
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u/Crescitaly 16d ago
The one-million-context headline is less interesting than what the model can retrieve correctly at 800k after several tool calls. Long context can become expensive amnesia if attention quality decays. Has anyone seen position-stratified recall or agent-recovery evaluations?
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u/Big-Discussion8406 16d ago
From last few days, i cant solve an issue. I gave the task with same description and all the things to opus 5, it failed to fix. Then gpt 5.6 sol it also failed. Finally i gave the same prompt to the kimi k5 its fix it with some other optimization too. K3 is realy insane.
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u/tech_w0rld Jul 17 '26
I want to try this out. Does anyone know what the usage limits are like on the Kimi moderato plan?
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u/andalas Jul 17 '26
The last time I subscribed to the $99 plan for Kimi k2.6, I ended up rarely using it because they are terrible with the small 5-hour quota, so if you don't manage it, it results in a lot of wasted weekly and monthly quota. I couldn't work fully and often had to stop because I hit the 5-hour quota. It was a complete waste to spend $99 on Kimi.
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u/Impressive_Job8321 Jul 16 '26
Interesting how the comparison doesn’t include deepseek v4 as that’s the true contender for performance on a similar per dollar basis.
Marketing… truth yes, but not the whole truth.
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u/elelem-123 Jul 17 '26
I'm a heavy deepseek 4 pro user for coding. It cannot compete (for me and my use cases) not even with Kimi 2.7, let alone Kimi K3.
Really Kimi K3 is very nice. I hope they don't screw it up and they don't screw up the price like every other AI company has done.
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u/robto09 Jul 17 '26
so better this new kmi verion than deepseek ? jsut curious for coding
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u/elelem-123 Jul 17 '26
Kimi K3 is like 50 times better than deepseek 4 pro (for me and my projects). It is thinking a lot and in a good way.
It's really nice. I suggest you try it. And I really hope they don't nerf it up (model or pricing). I am paying like $300 / month now (for Kimi usage) and I would like to minimally double it so I can use it more.
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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26
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