Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 194 posts

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#131

Post by weitendorf »

CaptainFever wrote: post #70
data_maan wrote: post #60

"Open source" lol Open-weight. As usual, you don't get the dataset, training scripts, etc.

It's not even open-weight. It's weight-available. It uses a "modified MIT license": Modified MIT License Copyright (c) 2025 Moonshot AI Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, su…

So "MIT with attribution" (but only for huge commercial use cases making tons of money off the product) is not open-weight? Do you consider CC BY photos on Wikipedia to be Image Available or GPL licensed software to be code-available too?

Tangent: I don't understand the contingent that gets upset about open LLMs not shipping with their full training regimes or source data. The software a company spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating, which you are now free to use and distribute with essentially no restrictions, is open source. It has weights in it, and a bunch of related software for actually running a model with those weights. How dare they!

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#132

Post by mindcrime »

wongarsu wrote: post #127
mindcrime wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not violate the OSD, but I would still argue that this license is a Bad Idea. Not because what they're trying to do is inherently bad in any way, but simply because it's yet another new, unknown, not-fully-understood license to deal with. The fact that we're having this conversation illustrating that very fact. My personal feeling is that almost every project (I'll hedge a little because life is complicated) s…

Aren't most licenses "not fully understood" in any reasonable legal sense? To my knowledge only the Artistic License and the GPL have seen the inside of a court room. And yet to this day nobody really knows how the GPL works with languages that don't follow C's model of a compile and a link step. And the boundaries of what's a derivative work in the GPL are still mostly set by convention, not a legal framework. What…

Aren't most licenses "not fully understood" in any reasonable legal sense?

OK, fair enough. Pretend I said "not well understood" instead. The point is, the long-standing, well known licenses that have been around for decades are better understood that some random "I made up my own thing" license. And yes, some of that may be down to just norms and conventions, and yes, not all of these licenses have been tested in court. But I think most people would feel more comfortable using an OSI approved license, and are hesitant to foster the creation of even more licenses.

If nothing else, license proliferation is bad because of the combinatorics of understanding license compatibility issues. Every new license makes the number of permutations that much bigger, and creates more unknown situations.

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#133

Post by owebmaster »

simonw wrote: post #115
alt187 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of this goes against the four fundamental freedoms? Can you point at it?

"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)." Being required to display branding in that way contradicts "run the program as you wish".

This freedom might be against the freedom of others to get your modifications.

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#135

Post by johnb231 »

ls612 wrote: post #123
johnb231 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all "too big to host at home". I don't think that is the issue here. https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2/blob/main/docs/deploy_... "The smallest deployment unit for Kimi-K2 FP8 weights with 128k seqlen on mainstream H200 or H20 platform is a cluster with 16 GPUs with either Tensor Parallel (TP) or "data parallel + expert parallel" (DP+EP)." 16 GPUs costing ~$30k each. No one is running a ~$500k server at…

This is a dumb question I know, but how expensive is model distillation? How much training hardware do you need to take something like this and create a 7B and 12B version for consumer hardware?

The process involves running the original model. You can rent these big GPUs for ~$10 per hour, so that is ~$160 per hour for as long as it takes

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#136

Post by weitendorf »

johnb231 wrote: post #108
irthomasthomas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at openai did say it was too big to host at home, so you could be right. They will probably be benchmaxxing, right now, searching for a few evals they can beat.

These are all "too big to host at home". I don't think that is the issue here. https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2/blob/main/docs/deploy_... "The smallest deployment unit for Kimi-K2 FP8 weights with 128k seqlen on mainstream H200 or H20 platform is a cluster with 16 GPUs with either Tensor Parallel (TP) or "data parallel + expert parallel" (DP+EP)." 16 GPUs costing ~$30k each. No one is running a ~$500k server at…

For most people, before it makes sense to just buy all the hardware yourself, you probably should be renting GPUs by the hour from the various providers serving that need. On Modal, I think should cost about $72/hr to serve Kimi K2 https://modal.com/pricing

Once that's running it can serve the needs of many users/clients simultaneously. It'd be too expensive and underutilized for almost any individual to use regularly, but it's not unreasonable for them to do it in short intervals just to play around with it. And it might actually be reasonable for a small number of students or coworkers to share a $70/hr deployment for ~40hr/week in a lot of cases; in other cases, that $70/hr expense could be shared across a large number of coworkers or product users if they use it somewhat infrequently.

So maybe you won't host it at home, but it's actually quite feasible to self-host, and is it ever really worth physically hosting anything at home except as a hobby?

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#137

Post by ensignavenger »

kragen wrote: post #78
satvikpendem wrote: post #75

This is not open source, they have a "modified MIT license" where they have other restrictions on users over a certain threshold. Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you…

I feel like those restrictions don't violate the OSD (or the FSF's Free Software Definition, or Debian's); there are similar restrictions in the GPLv2, the GPLv3, the 4-clause BSD license, and so on. They just don't have user or revenue thresholds. The GPLv2, for example, says: > c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use…

The OSD does not allow for discrimination:

"The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons."

"The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."

By having a clause that discriminates based on revenue, it cannot be Open Source.

If they had required everyone to provide attribution in the same manner, then we would have to examine the specifics of the attribution requirement to determine if it is compatible... but since they discriminate, it violates the open source definition, and no further analysis is necessary.

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#138

Post by [deleted] »

weitendorf wrote: post #136
johnb231 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all "too big to host at home". I don't think that is the issue here. https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2/blob/main/docs/deploy_... "The smallest deployment unit for Kimi-K2 FP8 weights with 128k seqlen on mainstream H200 or H20 platform is a cluster with 16 GPUs with either Tensor Parallel (TP) or "data parallel + expert parallel" (DP+EP)." 16 GPUs costing ~$30k each. No one is running a ~$500k server at…

For most people, before it makes sense to just buy all the hardware yourself, you probably should be renting GPUs by the hour from the various providers serving that need. On Modal, I think should cost about $72/hr to serve Kimi K2 https://modal.com/pricing Once that's running it can serve the needs of many users/clients simultaneously. It'd be too expensive and underutilized for almost any individual to use regularl…

[deleted]

Re: Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model

#139

Post by numpad0 »

overfeed wrote: post #121
fzzzy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, 5 tokens per second is plenty fast for casual use.

Also works perfectly fine in fire-and-forget, non-interactive agentic workflows. My dream scenario is that I create a bunch of kanban tickets and assign them to one or more AI personas[1], and wake up to some Pull Requests the next morning. I'd me more concerned about tickets-per-day, and not tk/s as I have no interest in watching the inner-workings of the model. 1. Some more creative than others, with slightly diffe…

> I create a bunch of kanban tickets and assign them to one or more AI personas[1],

Yeah that. Why can't we just `find ./tasks/ | grep \.md$ | xargs llm`. Can't we just write up a government proposal style document, have LLM recursively down into sub-sub-projects and back up until the original proposal document can be translated into a completion report. Constantly correcting a humongous LLM with infinite context length that can keep everything in its head doesn't feel like the right approach.

Post reply on HN