Live data from Hacker News

Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

moonshotai.github.io

171–180 of 442 posts

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#171
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese are doing it because they don't have access to enough of the latest GPUs to run their own models. Americans aren't doing this because they need to recoup the cost of their massive GPU investments.

I must be missing something important here. How do the Chinese train these models if they don't have access to the GPUs to train them?

> How do the Chinese train these models if they don't have access to the GPUs to train them?

they may be taking some western models: llama, chatgpt-oss, gemma, mistral, etc, and do postraining, which required way less resources.

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese are doing it because they don't have access to enough of the latest GPUs to run their own models. Americans aren't doing this because they need to recoup the cost of their massive GPU investments.

And Europeans don't it because quite frankly, we're not really doing anything particularly impressive with AI sadly.

At ECAI conference last week there was a panel discussion and someone had a great quote, "in Europe we are in the golden age of AI regulation, while the US and China are in the actual golden age of AI".

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In CS algorithms, we have space vs time tradeoffs. In LLMs, we will have bigger weights vs test-time compute tradeoffs. A smaller model can get "there" but it will take longer.

> In LLMs, we will have bigger weights vs test-time compute tradeoffs. A smaller model can get "there" but it will take longer. Assuming both are SOTA, a smaller model can't produce the same results as a larger model by giving it infinite time. Larger models inherently have more room for training more information into the model. No amount of test-retry cycle can overcome all of those limits. The smaller models will j…

[deleted]

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be much more excited to see what level of coding and reasoning performance can be wrung out of a much smaller LLM + agent Well, I think you are seeing that already? It's not like these models don't exist and they did not try to make them good, it's just that the results are not super great. And why would they be? Why would the good models (that are barely okay at coding) be big, if it was currently possible to…

In CS algorithms, we have space vs time tradeoffs. In LLMs, we will have bigger weights vs test-time compute tradeoffs. A smaller model can get "there" but it will take longer.

This doesn't work like that. An analogy would be giving a 5 year old a task that requires the understanding of the world of an 18 year old. It doesn't matter whether you give that child 5 minutes or 10 hours, they won't be capable of solving it.

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#175
post #42

Four independent Chinese companies released extremely good open source models in the past few months (DeepSeek, Qwen/Alibaba, Kimi/Moonshot, GLM/Z.ai). No American or European companies are doing that, including titans like Meta. What gives?

The Chinese are doing it because they don't have access to enough of the latest GPUs to run their own models. Americans aren't doing this because they need to recoup the cost of their massive GPU investments.

This is false. You can buy whole H100 clusters in China and Alibaba, Bytedance, Tencent etc have enough cards for training and inference.

Shenzhen 2025 https://imgur.com/a/r6tBkN3

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#176
post #25

This was the only recent model that provided a human solution to the stacking problem on the first try. https://medium.com/@nathanbos/gpt-4-may-have-general-intelli... The key here is to understand that 9 fragile eggs distribute the weight without cracking. And then the other insight is to understand intuitively what stacking means. Where arranging things around certain objects doesn't make any sense.

Or this problem made it into the training data set.

It's an old problem, and it, along with many of the answers are in many recent data sets.

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#177

Is the price here correct? https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking Would be $0,60 for input and $2,50 for 1 million output tokens. If the model is really that good it's 4x cheaper than comparable models. It's hosted at a loss or the others have a huge margin? I might miss something here. Would love some expert opinion :) FYI: the non thinking variant has the same price.

Yes, you may consider that opensource models hosted over Openrouter are charging about bare hardware costs, where in practice some providers there may run on subsidized hardware even, so there is money to be made.

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#178

It's good to see more competition, and open source, but I'd be much more excited to see what level of coding and reasoning performance can be wrung out of a much smaller LLM + agent as opposed to a trillion parameter one. The ideal case would be something that can be run locally, or at least on a modest/inexpensive cluster. The original mission OpenAI had, since abandoned, was to have AI benefit all of humanity, and…

What i do not understand is why we are not seeing specialized models that go down to single experts.

I do not need models that know how to program in Python, Rust, ... when i only use Go and Html. So we are we not seeing models that have very specialized experts, where for instance:

* General interpreter model, that holds context/memory * Go Model * Html model if there is space in memory. * SQL model if there is space in memory.

If there is no space, the GIM swamp out the Go model, for the HTML model, depending on where it is in Agent tasks or Edit/Ask code its overviewing.

Because the models are going to be very small, switching in and out of memory will be ultra fast But most of the time we get very big Expert models, that still are very generalized over a entire field.

This can then be extended that if you have the memory, models combine their output with tasks... Maybe i am just too much of a noob in the field of understanding how LLMs work, but it feels like people are too often running after large models that companies like Anthropic/OpenAI etc deploy. I understand why those big companies use insane big models. They have the money to load them up over a cluster, have the fast interconnect, and for them its more efficient.

But from the bits and pieces that i see, people are more and more going to tons of small 1 a 2B models to produce better results. See my argument above. Like i said, never really gone beyond paying for my CoPilot subscription and running a bit of Ollama at home (don't have the time for the big stuff).

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#179
post #19

uv tool install llm llm install llm-moonshot llm keys set moonshot # paste key llm -m moonshot/kimi-k2-thinking 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle' https://tools.simonwillison.net/svg-render#%3Csvg%20width%3D... Here's what I got using OpenRouter's moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking instead: https://tools.simonwillison.net/svg-render#%20%20%20%20%3Csv...

Does the run pin the temperature to 0 for consistency?

Re: Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

#180
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"open source" has come to mean "open weight" in model land. It is what it is. Words are used for communication, you are the one misusing the words. You can update the weights of the model, continue to train, whatever. Nobody is stopping you.

it still doesn't sit right. sure it's different in terms of mutability from say, compiled software programs, but it still remains not end to end reproducible and available for inspection. these words had meaning long before "model land" became a thing. overloading them is just confusing for everyone.

It's not confusing, no one is really confused except the people upset that the meaning is different in a different context.

On top of that, in many cases a company/group/whoever can't even reproduce the model themselves. There are lots of sources of non-determinism even if folks are doing things in a very buttoned up manner. And, when you are training on trillions of tokens, you are likely training on some awful sounding stuff - "Facebook is trained llama 4 on nazi propaganda!" is not what they want to see published.

How about just being thankful?

Post reply on HN