Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA • Hacker News Board

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#51

Post by linkregister » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:24 PM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #19

culi wrote: post #3

A third the cost, open source, and won't refuse every other request because of some vague possible connection to cybersecurity concerns.

Interestingly the reality of the open source release is they are opening up to full distillation by the closed source model providers at a deeper and more fundamental level. If anything the open sourcing will help Anthropic and open ai ladder up faster. Open source has always been about mutual cooperation towards a goal and has never closed the door to commercial success. All the hand wringing about open weight model…

I'm happy that Kimi K3 is indeed SotA and its open weights are due to be released soon.

It's also true that Moonshot and other labs distill from Claude. This has been reported on extensively. I don't think there's any alpha for Anthropic distilling from this model. I do not mean to discount the tremendous amount of innovation regarding MoE and quantization that Moonshot has accomplished. But its training with synthetic data is in large part from distillation from frontier labs.

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#52

Post by pishpash » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:24 PM UTC

guessmyname wrote: post #5

Why SoTA (uppercase “T”) instead of SotA (lowercase “T”) ? “State of [T]he Art” versus “State of [t]he Art”. If not SotA then at least SOTA, which is more accurate.

An cross of SoT (source of truth) and SotA (state of the art). SotA looks weird, admittedly.

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#53

Post by pishpash » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

HawtAds wrote: post #11

For model routers, do they have to retrain the routing model every time a new LLM is released?

Maybe a continuous evaluation process, why is there anything to train?

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#54

Post by luciana1u » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

we put a router model in front of two other models so the router can decide which model is better at deciding things. next we'll need a router for the router and eventually the entire internet is just routers routing routers to other routers

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#55

Post by arikrahman » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:28 PM UTC

apatheticonion wrote: post #37

I love the Chinese models. I use DeepSeek exclusively and now Kimi K3 offers a great planning assistant for more advanced coding tasks. DeepSeek v4 Flash is extremely fast and is able to handle pretty much anything I've thrown at it (I use mostly Rust, PSQL, Angular and Terraform). I self host Bifrost as my LLM gateway, though I wish LLM vendors would do monthly/daily automatic billing (like VPS providers do) rather…

The best part is using harnesses like reasonix or whale make cache hit at a rate close to 98%, making requests converge to practically free. And that's with unsubsidized American providers like cloudflare or Digital Ocean.

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#56

Post by JSR_FDED » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:30 PM UTC

jrflo wrote: post #10

Hmmm, a company that hosts open models is telling us how good open models are...

They share their methodology and results. I learned things about the relative strengths and weaknesses of Kimi and Fable I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Should being in the model hosting business disqualify them from sharing?

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#57

Post by charcircuit » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:30 PM UTC

villish wrote: post #41

culi wrote: post #3

A third the cost, open source, and won't refuse every other request because of some vague possible connection to cybersecurity concerns.

From the blog post moonshot refers to it as open source but only mentions releasing the weights.

The weights are the "source" of a model.

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#58

Post by skeledrew » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:30 PM UTC

shikon7 wrote: post #50

dgellow wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My questions about strawberries got blocked as too dangerous! I’m not joking

Strawberries are a well known weakness of LLMs, as they have a hard time to count the numbers of "r"s in them. Maybe that's why, because they fear that weakness could be exploited somehow.

Probably need to be taught by someone of Latino origin. Learning to roll them "r"s could help.

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#59

Post by samtp » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:30 PM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #44

apatheticonion wrote: post #37

I love the Chinese models. I use DeepSeek exclusively and now Kimi K3 offers a great planning assistant for more advanced coding tasks. DeepSeek v4 Flash is extremely fast and is able to handle pretty much anything I've thrown at it (I use mostly Rust, PSQL, Angular and Terraform). I self host Bifrost as my LLM gateway, though I wish LLM vendors would do monthly/daily automatic billing (like VPS providers do) rather…

Have you looked into OpenCode Zen or OpenCode Go? https://opencode.ai/zen

there is also https://cline.bot/cline-pass

Re: Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA

#60

Post by Buttons840 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

I have several thoughts about this, which I'll just iterate:

1) US export bans have made it so that Chinese companies have to compete using less-than-state-of-the-art hardware. This has forced Chinese companies to build more cost efficient models. Whereas, US companies have moreso tried to be state of the art by spending more money than anyone else on state-of-the-art hardware.

2) Xi Jinping has called for more open AI models (not to be confused with the closed models of OpenAI), and I'm happy to see a powerful world leader advocating for open-weight AI models. Whereas, the US seems likely to just ban models.

3) My impression is that, if China surpasses the US in AI development, there will basically be nothing that the US does better than the rest of the world--except for military spending--we spend a lot, but we don't necessarily spend well (something something Iran). I mean, if the US is no longer a tech leader in the world, like... what are we a leader at? Manufacturing? Healthcare? LOL. Are we a leader in any industry or by any metric? I wonder if China is attempting to remove the last jewel in the USA's crown with these AI releases.

4) It must be refreshing for companies to have access to a new model that isn't going to get pulled because the government bans it 2 days after release. And it's open-weight so it wont go away--amazing--what a shift in the market.

5) If it becomes clear that open-weight models are the future of AI, will that pop a huge bubble in the US economy? Maybe. But, on the other hand, these companies aren't just training AIs, they are also building data centers which will remain valuable no matter what happens.