Kimi K3: benchmarks, pricing, hardware requirements, and self-hosting

Kimi K3, developed by Moonshot AI, is a cutting-edge 2.8-trillion-parameter multimodal reasoning model designed for complex tasks requiring extensive reasoning, visual understanding, and long context processing, with a context window accommodating up to 1 million tokens. While currently available through Moonshot's applications and API, the model's full weights are scheduled for public release by 27 July 2026, allowing for self-hosting and deployment in customized environments. Kimi K3 employs a Sparse Mixture of Experts architecture, activating 16 out of 896 experts per computation, and incorporates innovations like Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals for efficient processing. Despite its current API-only availability, the model is recognized for its strong performance in coding and multi-step agent tasks, although its user experience reportedly lags behind some proprietary competitors. Moonshot recommends deploying Kimi K3 on configurations with 64 or more accelerators, reflecting its substantial computational demands. The model's API pricing strategy reflects its capabilities, charging $3 per million cache-miss input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, while cache-hit inputs cost significantly less.

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