What is Kimi K3? A Complete Developer Guide for 2026

Kimi K3 is presented as Moonshot AI’s 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight multimodal model, released in July 2026, using a mixture-of-experts architecture with 104 billion active parameters per token, 896 experts, and a one-million-token context window for text, image, and video inputs. Moonshot reports that it performs competitively with leading proprietary systems on coding, agent, browsing, and vision benchmarks, though some visual scores depend substantially on tool access. The model’s weights are available through Hugging Face, while hosted API access is offered by Moonshot, OpenRouter, Fireworks AI, Baseten, and Together AI, generally at about $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, with some cheaper OpenRouter routes. Self-hosting the full model requires substantial enterprise hardware, storage, and investment, with minimum configurations involving multiple high-memory accelerators and production recommendations reaching 64 or more accelerators; lower-bit community quantizations reduce requirements but may reduce accuracy. The text also describes using Kimi K3 in OpenCode and adding live web retrieval through Firecrawl’s MCP integration, while noting that Windows users may have a smoother experience through WSL.

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