Why Kimi K3 matters

Kimi K3 launched a few days back and it's taken X and key people in the AI community quite surprised and shaken.

Kimi is the open-weights model from Moonshots AI from China. Kimi has always been a different model. It's smart, dense – in my experience it gave the most dense thinking ever for any model. It would take sometimes multiple reads to understand the depth of its thinking. And its quite cheap too.

Now Moonshots AI launched Kimi K3. Open-Weights – so you know how its was built, change it, host it wherever you want. It's big 2.8 trillion parameter model. A few years back 12B was a large model.  And it's cheap compared to it's frontier rivals like Claude Fable/Opus and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol or 5.5. 

It has bested them in a few benchmarks and holds its own on 3rd on a few others. This is the extraordinary bit.

If you are have been following there has been a lot of access issues around Fable and then 5.6 from the US govt. Here we have a similarly capable model without any restrictions. That totally changes the game.

This shows that open-weights models can be at the Frontier. If you wait a few days, you can access it from US based providers like Fireworks or Perplexity will integrate it and the famous Cursor IDE Composer model is based on Kimi.

 Thinking Machines will give you a chance to tinker with it and finetune for your work and suddenly you have a model that is powerful and yours.

And if you can do it, have a powerful local setup to totally take it offline and on prem. 

If you are a CIO, CTO, CFO and ofcourse a CEO, you must be thinking about your open-weights model strategy. It was always important but Kimi changes the game.

I asked a question previously "What does your AI have that other AI's don't have".

I can see in the coming months and years, organisations using their proprietary data to create models that work for them. This is your answer to that question. You need to have your own proprietary data sets, workflows, fine tuned models etc to ensure that you remain competitive and your business models are resilient and infact thriving in this co-intelligence age.