Moonshot AI
Moonshot AI
VideoOpen Weights (Open) Verified Architecture & SpecsFree ($0 API Tokens)

Kimi K3

Multimodal Kimi model with 1M context and toggleable max-effort thinking for long-horizon agent work

Technical Architecture & Execution Specifications
Architecture Overview

Kimi K3

Multimodal Kimi model with 1M context and toggleable max-effort thinking for long-horizon agent work

Supported Modalities
textimagevideo

Hardware & Execution ParametersVideo

Total Parameter CountOpen Weights
Active Parameters (MoE)Dense Architecture
Context Window Capacity1,048,576 tokens
Model Weights FootprintCloud Hosted API
Distribution LicenseOpen Weights (Open)
Standard API Pricing (1M Tokens)Free / Self-Hosted
Model Heritage & Evolutionary Lineage

Genealogical Graph & Evolutionary Provenance

Tracing foundational base architecture ancestry, architectural successors, scale siblings, and reasoning distillation derivatives.

Independent Foundation Checkpoint

Kimi K3 operates as an autonomous foundation model architecture without direct precursor derivatives in this catalog.

Root Architecture Node
AI Model Architecture & Intelligence

Architecture Engineering & Capability Deep-Dive

An objective architectural evaluation of Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI, analyzing underlying compute dynamics, memory constraints, and deployment economics.

Topology & Attention Mechanics

A robust autoregressive transformer utilizing standard attention patterns for predictable and coherent token generation.

Architecture Type:Advanced Transformer

Evaluation Profile & Reasoning

Exhibits frontier-tier behavior in reasoning and coding.

Domain Specialty:Video

LLM Hardware Sizing & Serving

For open deployments via vLLM/SGLang, quantization (INT4/AWQ) is heavily recommended to fit dense memory constraints, or multi-GPU pipeline parallelism for full FP16.

KV Cache Mgmt: PagedAttention / FlashAttention-3
Hosting Type:Open Weights (Open)

Inference Economics & Workflows

Well-suited for enterprise pipelines where capability is balanced against per-million token costs.

Enterprise Fit:Production Ready
Production Trade-Offs & Capability Balance

Architectural Strengths vs. Considerations

An objective balance sheet analyzing the operational advantages and production constraints of deploying Kimi K3.

Key Architectural Strengths

  • Massive 1,048,576-token context allows full-repository and book-length ingestion.
  • Demonstrated DeepSWE evaluation score of 67.5% in verified benchmarks.

Operational Considerations

  • 128k+ token prefill stages become heavily compute-bound and balloon KV cache without PagedAttention chunking.
LLM Hardware Sizing & Runtime Compatibility

Inference Runtimes & Hardware Sizing

Deployment targets, inference engines, and memory requirements for Kimi K3.

Recommended Hardware Profile:
1x RTX 4070 / 4080 (16GB) or Mac M-Series (16GB Unified)
Consumer GPU (< 16 GB VRAM)
Est. 0.0 GB (FP16) / 0.0 GB (INT4)
Production Serving Recipes
vLLM Production
python3 -m vllm.entrypoints.openai.api_server --model Kimi K3 --tensor-parallel-size 1 --gpu-memory-utilization 0.95 --max-model-len 4096 --enable-chunked-prefill
Ollama / llama.cpp
ollama run kimi k3
SGLang Structured
python3 -m sglang.launch_server --model-path Kimi K3 --tp 1 --trust-remote-code
TGI Serving
text-generation-launcher --model-id Kimi K3 --num-shard 1 --max-batch-prefill-tokens 32000
Supported Inference Engines
vLLM

High-throughput PagedAttention server

Supported
Ollama

One-click CLI & local desktop serving

Supported
SGLang

Fast multi-turn structured decoding

Supported
TGI

Text Generation Inference

Supported
Llama.cpp

GGUF CPU/Apple Silicon execution

Supported
Precision & Quantization Formats
BF16 / FP16Full Precision

~0.0 GB VRAM required

FP8 (E4M3)Native FP8

~0.0 GB VRAM (Hopper speedup)

AWQ / GPTQ (4-bit)Activation-Aware

~0.0 GB VRAM

GGUF (Q4_K_M)Quantized Binary

CPU RAM / Apple Silicon optimized

LLM Benchmark Database & Performance Metrics

13 Tested

Standardized evaluation results across reasoning, agentic coding, computer use, and alignment.

Flagship Headline MetricsIndustry SOTA Standard
Coding & Software

DeepSWE

67.5%resolve rate
0%100%
DeepSWE
resolve rate
67.5%
Terminal-Bench
accuracy
88.3%
FrontierSWE
dominance score
81.2%
Program Bench
score
77.8%
SWE Marathon
resolve rate
42%
GDPval-AA
Elo
1668
AA-Briefcase
Elo
1548
AutomationBench
success rate
30.8%
Commercial Rates & Inference Costs

API & Deployment Pricing

Open-weights model available for local and private cloud deployment. Compute costs depend on the target GPU hardware instance.

Deployment TierPricing Structure
Open Checkpoint Weights$0.00 (Free Download)
Inference Token Consumption$0.00 / Token
Inference Cost & ROI Engine
Market Cloud Rate
Prompt / Input Volume:50M Tokens / mo
1M500M1,000M
Generated / Output Volume:10M Tokens / mo
1M250M500M
Estimated Monthly Spend
$125.00/ mo
Input (50M @ $1.50/1M):$75.00
Output (10M @ $5.00/1M):$50.00
Cloud GPU Breakeven Ratio
RunPod RTX 4090 ($316/mo)0.40x spend
Lambda 1x H100 ($1,800/mo)0.07x spend
💡 Open-weights model. You can self-host for $0 token API charge or consume via managed serverless endpoints at the rates shown above.
Similar Frontier Models & Alternatives
Explore All Comparisons

Comparable Foundation Architectures

Alternative models in the Video class with similar capabilities, context windows, or deployment profiles.

Alibaba CloudVideo

Qwen3.8 Flash Next

Context:262k ctx
Parameters:Open Weights
Input Rate:Free / Self-Host
Zhipu AIVideo

GLM-5.3-Flash

Context:1000k ctx
Parameters:Proprietary
Input Rate:Free / Self-Host
Alibaba CloudVideo

Qwen3.8 Flash

Context:1000k ctx
Parameters:Proprietary
Input Rate:$0.15/1M
Integration & Deployment
import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key=os.environ.get("MOONSHOT_AI_KEY", "EMPTY"),
    base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1"
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="moonshotai-kimi-k3",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum superposition in 2 sentences."}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions about Kimi K3

Essential facts, architectural specs, hardware constraints, and pricing answers for Kimi K3.

To run Kimi K3 (Open Weights) locally, you generally need Depends on quantization. We recommend using quantized GGUF/AWQ formats with Ollama or vLLM to optimize memory footprint.

Primary Sources & Access Repositories

All technical specifications, parameter distributions, context architectures, and benchmark evaluations for Kimi K3 are audited against primary source release documentation, research whitepapers, and verified vendor API endpoints.

api id:moonshotai/kimi-k3