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Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

huggingface.co

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Re: Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

#111
post #48

This will be interesting for a few reasons. First, depending on where the median pricing settles w/ 3rd party providers will tell us what it costs to serve a 3T model. Since it's going to be mxfp4 native, it'll take ~1.5TB of VRAM to host this, which is juuust at the limit of 8xb200s (but realistically you'll need 16x for context / throughput optimisation). Won't be cheap to host, but at least we should get some rang…

> Then we'll be able to guesstimate if "labs are subsidising tokens on API pricing". No, you don't. Without training cost you can infer only the marginal cost of serving this kind of models. Moreover, you don't know the actual size of closed models (what if Fable is a 10T model? What if it's 1T?)

Gross margins are insanely important, possibly the most important single metric if for some reason you were forced to choose one.

Re: Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

#112

I feel like most hardware to run LLMs on is shaped wrong for individuals. It's either having a model struggling along with like 5-10 tokens per second on unified memory, or data center cards with hundreds of GB of VRAM consuming more than a kW of power. It doesn't seem like there's prosumer GPUs with like 180W-250W TDP and 128 GB or 256 GB of VRAM (one can dream). Then bifurcation and even just two of those cards wou…

The individual-shaped-hardware problem gets even sharper at the phone end. Shipping a 3B model on-device, the usable RAM budget after the OS and everything else is more like 2-4GBtotal, not per-model so it's not 'can I afford more VRAM', it's 'can I fit a language model and an STT model and embeddings without the OS killing my process'. Feels like phones are the most hardware-constrained 'individual' tier and get the least airtime in these kind of discussion. Is that because the models that fit are still too limited to be interesting, or something else?

Re: Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

#113
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is a mixture of experts (MoE) model like the 2.x models, won't this reduce the hardware needed to run the model? The Kimi-K2.6 model is 1.1T parameters with 32B active parameters. With light quantization (Q6_K) that's enough to run it (slowly) on a single 5090. On a single B200 you can have 5-6 experts loaded into VRAM at a time. Realistically that would be 3-4 to account for the context. [!] [!] With this and…

> The Kimi-K2.6 model is 1.1T parameters with 32B active parameters. With light quantization (Q6_K) that's enough to run it (slowly) on a single 5090 Without leveraging system RAM and/or SSDs, I don't think you can, or how exactly are you running this, if this is something you are doing today? With CPU/expert offloading you could probably do it with a 5090 + 1TB of RAM or something like that, but absolutely not on a…

Yes hybrid approaches are much better than people realise.

There are a lot of optimisations that are not in the public sphere, source working on start up in this space

Re: Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

#116

I feel like most hardware to run LLMs on is shaped wrong for individuals. It's either having a model struggling along with like 5-10 tokens per second on unified memory, or data center cards with hundreds of GB of VRAM consuming more than a kW of power. It doesn't seem like there's prosumer GPUs with like 180W-250W TDP and 128 GB or 256 GB of VRAM (one can dream). Then bifurcation and even just two of those cards wou…

I have found that the "mostly didn't lose anything" Q8 large models that I want to run are all too large to run on the "only $3995!" 128GB max RAM systems that some people are buying, and definitely won't fit with any usable amount of context. Things like Qwen 3.5 122B Q8 or deepseek v4 flash Q8, or Laguna S 2.1 Q8 need 170-190GB of RAM including full context, which fits on a 256GB RAM dual socket workstation or rack…

There's an emerging practice of using Q4 quants and Q8 KV cache for local inference. At that point you can run both Qwen3.5-122B-A10B (my personal choice on Framework Desktop 128gb) and Laguna-S-2.1.

Now whether that's good enough for one's use-case remains to be determined. You can also get more out of those (local models and quantizations) if you further tweak the harness you use them with, but tbh this is where it gets too much work (at least for me and the time I have available).

Re: Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

#117

I feel like most hardware to run LLMs on is shaped wrong for individuals. It's either having a model struggling along with like 5-10 tokens per second on unified memory, or data center cards with hundreds of GB of VRAM consuming more than a kW of power. It doesn't seem like there's prosumer GPUs with like 180W-250W TDP and 128 GB or 256 GB of VRAM (one can dream). Then bifurcation and even just two of those cards wou…

I agree but worth noting that it's never gonna be very practical to run LLMs like this at home. Unless we have some sort of design breakthrough, the only "sensible" way to run them is at high batch levels on shared HW. Like, yeah if I could spend a few grand on such a GPU I probably would coz I'm a rich nerd, but I'd acknowledge it as an extremely inefficient luxury, kinda like a sports car. So I think you could say…

‘Never’ is a big word in the computing world. 10 years from now a model this size will probably run on a high-end phone.

Of course, by then we’ll want to run something commensurately larger.

Re: Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

#118

This will be interesting for a few reasons. First, depending on where the median pricing settles w/ 3rd party providers will tell us what it costs to serve a 3T model. Since it's going to be mxfp4 native, it'll take ~1.5TB of VRAM to host this, which is juuust at the limit of 8xb200s (but realistically you'll need 16x for context / throughput optimisation). Won't be cheap to host, but at least we should get some rang…

We have a lossless compression codec (working on open sourcing it over the next couple of weeks) that reduces it down to its minimum entropy -- it cannot be compressed further. On all tested large models, it's a ratio of 1.34-1.23 -- and smaller models up to 3.76x. It also increases the effective bandwidth by the same rate.

Re: Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace

#119

I feel like most hardware to run LLMs on is shaped wrong for individuals. It's either having a model struggling along with like 5-10 tokens per second on unified memory, or data center cards with hundreds of GB of VRAM consuming more than a kW of power. It doesn't seem like there's prosumer GPUs with like 180W-250W TDP and 128 GB or 256 GB of VRAM (one can dream). Then bifurcation and even just two of those cards wou…

The individual-shaped-hardware problem gets even sharper at the phone end. Shipping a 3B model on-device, the usable RAM budget after the OS and everything else is more like 2-4GBtotal, not per-model so it's not 'can I afford more VRAM', it's 'can I fit a language model and an STT model and embeddings without the OS killing my process'. Feels like phones are the most hardware-constrained 'individual' tier and get the…

Recently spent a few hours messing with bonsai 27B and ternary bonsai 27B at total weights + context fitting in slightly under 6GB RAM, and it's just dumb as hell. It writes what seems like grammatically correct content but it's extremely limited.

It will also happily hallucinate new names and content to fill in gaps in its knowledge, and present the hallucations in what looks like a correctly formatted sentence, so it could fool a person who doesn't know the subject matter. Like, I asked it for a description of Seattle and it hallucinated a name and description of a nonexistant tallest building in the city and suggested the view from its observation deck .

https://prismml.com/news/bonsai-27b

https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-27B-gguf

In no way was I surprised, it's asking a lot of under 6GB RAM usage. But I think for 99% of people they will get better results doing something over the network where the weights and inference engine are not on the device.

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