FrontierThe story, in brief
Kimi's open model K3 nears GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 while signaling the end of super cheap Chinese AI
2.8 trillion parameters. Kimi's K3 just closed the gap with GPT-5.6 Sol—and killed the era of $0.01 Chinese AI.
The KeyNews take
Why it matters
Kimi's K3 open-weight model demonstrates that cutting-edge capability is no longer the exclusive domain of US labs, while signaling a market shift: competitive Chinese models are moving upmarket, abandoning the race-to-the-bottom pricing that characterized the previous generation.
The key facts
6 to knowK3: 2.8 trillion parameters, 1M context window
Benchmark performance: competitive with Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol
Beats Opus 4.8 and GLM 5.2 on some benchmarks
Full weights release scheduled July 27
K3 pricing significantly higher than predecessor
Signals end of ultra-cheap Chinese AI commoditization
Go to the source
The Decoderthe-decoder.com
Publisher excerpt: Kimi is launching K3, a multimodal open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters and one million tokens of context. In the company's own benchmarks, it comes close to Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol while beating Opus 4.8 and GLM 5.2, in some cases by a wide margin. The model is also significantly…