Models › Kimi family

Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking

moonshotai MIT out 19 months ago

16.4B parameters, 3B active (6 of 64 experts per token), images and text in, text out, 128K tokens of context.

Verified 2026-10-25 Rank #618 in LLMs · score 73.7 method v1 Sources 3 Downloads 30d 12.5k · #491 of 619 tracked

Can I run it?9.8GB at INT4Estimatefits a 16 GB cardmethod
Can I use it?MITPermissivelicence file2026-10-24
Do people use it?12.5kdownloads, 30 days#491 of 619 we track · below the median+0 likes, downloads −13% this week455 likesHugging Face2026-10-24

Worth reading

Picked by rule from 15 tracked pieces: the lab's own post, the most shared, a field report, the latest.

Most discussed · 407 HN pts

Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model available via API with open weights promised by July 27, 2026.

  • Kimi K3's tokenizer counts the 'hi' prompt as 86 tokens, suggesting an 85 token hidden system prompt.
  • The model is the most expensive released by a Chinese AI lab to date at $3/million input tokens.
simonwillison.net 2026-07-17 407 HN pts · 223 comments 1.1k words about the Kimi family family
Latest · 47 days ago

Kimi K3 (2.8T) at 1 token/s on a MacBook Pro, streamed from four SSDs

A fork of Deltafin runs the full 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model on a single M5 Max MacBook Pro with 128 GB RAM, streaming 1.45 TB of expert weights from four SSDs.

  • The slowest read among a layer's 16 experts sets the pace, not total bandwidth.
  • Streaming setup initially runs far more slowly when routes have no local cache yet.
github.com 2026-09-08 279 HN pts · 156 comments 2.1k words about the Kimi family family

15 best of 15 tracked

The 2 picks above, plus these 13. Top is the radar's score: discussion, source authority and the lab's own posts, fading with age.

  1. ArticleKimi K3-256kkimi.com · 2026-07-29 · 492 HN pts · official
  2. CodeKimi-K3 Technical Report [pdf]github.com · 2026-07-27 · 391 HN pts
  3. ArticleSmaller, faster, safer: running Kimi and GLM at scaleblog.cloudflare.com · 2026-08-03 · 267 HN pts
  4. ArticleKimi K2.6: Advancing open-source codingkimi.com · 2026-04-20 · 710 HN pts · official
  5. ArticleKimi vendor verifier – verify accuracy of inference providerskimi.com · 2026-04-20 · 310 HN pts · official
  6. ArticleKimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challengethinkpol.ca · 2026-05-03 · 380 HN pts
  7. ArticleKimi Released Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual SOTA-Agentic Modelkimi.com · 2026-01-27 · 502 HN pts · official
  8. CodeKimi K2.5 Technical Report [pdf]github.com · 2026-01-30 · 388 HN pts
  9. ArticleKimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning modelmoonshotai.github.io · 2025-11-06
  10. DiscussionKimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language modeltwitter.com · 2025-07-11
  11. CodeKimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecturegithub.com · 2025-10-31
  12. DiscussionKimi K2 1T model runs on 2 512GB M3 Ultrastwitter.com · 2025-12-14
  13. CodeKimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language modelgithub.com · 2025-07-12

Where it's used

Hugging Face does not say who downloads a model or with what. These are the proxies: API providers listing it, quantized builds, fine-tunes/adapters/merges, and Spaces that load it.

No API provider serves it, so its downloads are people running it themselves: 4 quantized builds and 23 Spaces.

  • As a service0no API provider listed
  • On own hardware4quantized builds
  • Built on00 fine-tunes · 0 adapters · 0 merges
  • In apps23Hugging Face Spaces

Top Spaces running it: aimevzulari/Prompt_Uzmani ♥ 46 · ReallyFloppyPenguin/AICodepen ♥ 2

Will it fit?

Weights only, an estimate: leave room for the KV cache. Method

Fits a 16 GB card at INT4

About 9.8 GB at INT4, 20 GB at FP8, 39 GB at BF16: weights only, so leave room for the KV cache. Every expert must be resident, so total parameters count.

16 GB card64 GB Mac2×80 GB8×80 GBINT4: about 9.8 GB of weights (estimate; KV cache and activations extra)INT49.8 GBFP8: about 20 GB of weights (estimate; KV cache and activations extra)FP820 GBBF16: about 39 GB of weights (estimate; KV cache and activations extra)BF1639 GB
16 GB card64 GB Mac2×80 GB8×80 GBINT4: about 9.8 GB of weights (estimate; KV cache and activations extra)INT49.8 GBFP8: about 20 GB of weights (estimate; KV cache and activations extra)FP820 GBBF16: about 39 GB of weights (estimate; KV cache and activations extra)BF1639 GB

Estimate params × bytes per param × 1.2 · how we estimate

The story so far

Weights, every dated article, and repo commits on one rail.

10 dated articles and 21 repo commits so far

Teal is the weights (2025-04-09), amber triangles are 10 dated articles (each links to it), grey ticks are repo commits.

What people built on it

4 derivatives on the Hub. Which build to run, by runtime: the most downloaded in each class.

4 derivatives on the Hub, most of them quantized

From the Hugging Face model tree; quantized builds in teal, fine-tunes, merges and adapters in greys.

4 quantized (Hugging Face model tree)4 quantized
4 quantized (Hugging Face model tree)4 quantized

All variants →

Reference

Everything else, folded: the full tables, every source.

Benchmarks

3 rows

Benchmarks 3 rows

measured third-party leaderboard rowauthor-reported number from the model card or eval files (3)No confidence intervals unless the source gave them; settings differ between rows, so compare within a benchmark, not across. Date = the benchmark's own date when it gives one, else when we read it.
BenchmarkValueSetting / notesReported byDate
author-reported MMMU · Understand images and video61.7 pass@1Kimi-VL-Thinking-A3Bmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported MathVision · Understand images and video36.8 pass@1Kimi-VL-Thinking-A3Bmodel author2026-10-07
author-reported MathVista · Understand images and video71.3 pass@1Kimi-VL-Thinking-A3Bmodel author2026-10-07

What the card says

1 cited sentence

Summary generated, cited

Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking is an open-source Mixture-of-Experts vision-language model designed for advanced multimodal reasoning.[1]

  1. “Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) vision-language model (VLM)”

Generated 2026-10-07 15:11 UTC by parasail-gemma-4-26b-a4b-it; each numeral points at the fact it rests on. Not a verdict.

Use-case evidence

6 use cases

What it is good at 6 use cases

Labels are evidence, not verdicts: measured a third-party leaderboard row for this model; author-reported a number the model author published in the card or eval files; structural a deterministic signal from the name, config or chat template, or a decision-model estimate. Each chip links to its source. All use cases.

Facts

24 fields

Listed in LLMs · MoE

Facts

Pipeline tagimage-text-to-text
Librarytransformers
ArchitecturesKimiVLForConditionalGeneration
Model typekimi_vl
Dtypebfloat16
Params by dtypeBF16: 16,407,657,776
Size bandL
MoEyes
Experts64
Experts per token6
Context length131,072 (config.json max_position_embeddings)
PapersarXiv:2504.07491
LicenseMIT (mit)
Hub snapshot2026-10-25

Servability

vLLM · SGLang

Servability

vLLM: supported · KimiVLForConditionalGeneration · 7050ef881ff0835f6890a47db1859a24c65481d6SGLang: supported · KimiVLForConditionalGeneration · 773cb938fe9484a8f7e7e46fb1b1fe96412c59ed

vLLM registry (7050ef881ff0835f6890a47db1859a24c65481d6) · SGLang registry (773cb938fe9484a8f7e7e46fb1b1fe96412c59ed) · Matched by architecture class name against each project's registry on main; 'supported' means the architecture is registered, not that this checkpoint was tested.

Hardware fit

3 estimates

Hardware fit ESTIMATE

Weights-only memory for Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking: params × bytes/param × 1.2 overhead. KV cache and activations are extra. How this is computed.

BF16 (2 bytes/param)39 GB · Single high-end GPU (<80 GB)
FP8 (1 byte/param)20 GB · Single GPU (<24 GB)
INT4 (0.5 bytes/param)9.8 GB · Single GPU (<24 GB)

Weights only (params × bytes/param × 1.2 overhead); KV cache and activations extra. MoE: all experts must be resident, so total parameters count.

All variants

4 variants

Lineage

Fine-tuned from moonshotai/Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct (same organization) Family: moonshotai/Kimi 4 derivatives on the Hub

Base model: moonshotai/Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct

quantized: 4

Top variants (4 shown, ranked by downloads)

4 rows
Variant Relation Quant Params Band License Author Likes Downloads
JohnConnor123/Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-BNB-4bit quantized -BNB 16.7B L — JohnConnor123 1 167.3k
kuanysho/Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-BNB-4bit quantized -BNB 16.7B L — kuanysho 2 273
JohnConnor123/Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-BNB-8bit quantized -BNB 16.4B L — JohnConnor123 2 198
kuanysho/Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking quantized — 16.4B L — kuanysho 0 66

Repository changelog

21 commits

Repository changelog 21 commits

DateCommitSHA
2026-01-30 Transformers v5 support (#19) 7d99e22
2025-08-18 remove _validate_images_text_input_order as well (#18) 481598c
2025-06-27 Update README.md 3702c31
2025-06-21 Update README.md 33ec794
2025-06-18 Update README.md acec364
2025-04-20 update generation config (#15) 16681d8
2025-04-20 set do_sample as true (#14) ceb7ae6
2025-04-20 add generation_config.json (#13) c95c453
2025-04-20 remove log from tokenizer (#12) 5b6731b
2025-04-14 support training (#10) e784cd9
2025-04-14 tokenizer can decode tensor for vllm test (#9) 622aeb0
2025-04-13 fix GenerationMixin ImportError in transformers main branch (#6) 3f0f648
2025-04-12 Update README.md 50260a0
2025-04-12 Update README.md bfd4bc4
2025-04-12 Update README.md edb5925
2025-04-12 Add library_name metadata and link to paper (#3) 17bce8a
2025-04-11 can set attn_implementation (#4) e957990
2025-04-11 Update README.md 54d622b
2025-04-11 support infer in cpu device (#2) 3ce416b
2025-04-09 upload f321730
2025-04-09 initial commit c8504ea

Articles and coverage

15 pieces

Ranked by source signals (HN, Lobsters, authority domains, official posts) and recency. Summaries are generated from a stored copy of the article text; every sentence cites a span of that text, and nothing is shown that failed the citation check.

Official4

kimi.com2026-07-29officialauthorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 492 pts · 157 comments1,561 words
K3.1 Pro is now fully rolled out in Kimi Code as the first model of the new K3.1 series with a 1M context window. K3.1 Pro Highspeed delivers approximately 2–3× the speed of K3.1 Pro while maintaining identical model capabilities.generated, cited
kimi.com2026-04-20officialauthorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 710 pts · 372 comments2,299 words
Kimi K2.6 is an open-source model released for advanced coding, long-horizon execution, and agent swarm capabilities. It is available via Kimi.com, the Kimi App, the API, and Kimi Code, showing a 12% increase in code generation accuracy and a 96.60% tool invocation success rate. The model scales agent swarms to 300 sub-agents executing across 4,000 coordinated steps simultaneously.written, reviewed, cited
  • Kimi K2.6 optimizes model inference in Zig, a highly niche programming language, to demonstrate exceptional out-of-distribution generalization.
  • The model reconfigured the exchange-core thread topology from 4ME+2RE to 2ME+1RE to extract a 185% medium throughput leap.
kimi.com2026-04-20officialauthorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 310 pts · 33 comments546 words
kimi.com2026-01-27officialauthorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 502 pts · 239 comments1,856 words
Kimi K2.5 self-directs an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents executing parallel workflows across up to 1,500 tool calls. This swarm architecture reduces execution time by up to 4.5x compared to a single-agent setup without predefined workflows.generated, cited

Analysis6

github.com2026-09-08authorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 279 pts · 156 comments2,117 words
A fork of Deltafin runs the full 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model on a single M5 Max MacBook Pro with 128 GB RAM, streaming 1.45 TB of expert weights from four SSDs. One cold run with the exact prompt yields 1.00 tokens per second for 512-token answers and 0.96 tok/s on a public 17-token prompt, with per-run logs available in k3-public-bench/. A 512-token prompt takes approximately 6.3 minutes to generate the first token because prefill re-reads each layer's experts 8×.written, reviewed, cited
  • The slowest read among a layer's 16 experts sets the pace, not total bandwidth.
  • Streaming setup initially runs far more slowly when routes have no local cache yet.
  • The native server refuses anything it cannot honor exactly with a normal OpenAI-shaped error.
simonwillison.net2026-07-17authorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 407 pts · 223 comments1,140 words
Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model available via API with open weights promised by July 27, 2026. The model costs $3/million input tokens and $15/million output tokens, consuming 13,241 reasoning tokens to generate a simple SVG for a total cost of 25 cents. While it surpasses Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 high on benchmarks, it loses to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.written, reviewed, cited
  • Kimi K3's tokenizer counts the 'hi' prompt as 86 tokens, suggesting an 85 token hidden system prompt.
  • The model is the most expensive released by a Chinese AI lab to date at $3/million input tokens.
  • K3 currently only has one thinking effort level called 'max' rather than multiple options.
github.com2026-07-27authorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 391 pts · 183 comments
blog.cloudflare.com2026-08-03HN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 267 pts · 66 comments1,451 words
Cloudflare Workers AI serves Kimi K-series and GLM models by quantizing KV caches to FP8 (e4m3) and compressing GLM 5.2 weights from 705 GB to 421 GB using INT4. These optimizations allow the system to handle 64 concurrent requests on H200 GPUs while keeping throughput changes under 1% through a separate batch integrity check layer.written, reviewed, cited
  • Workers AI runs inference for Kimi and GLM on GPUs in Cloudflare data centers close to your users.
  • The system leaves the KV cache in BF16 for the prefill phase because it is compute-bound rather than memory-bound.
  • KV cache integrity checking aborts requests if page tags do not match, preventing data from the wrong page.
thinkpol.ca2026-05-03HN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 380 pts · 219 comments1,401 words
Kimi K2.6 won the Word Gem Puzzle challenge with 22 match points and a 7-1-0 record, beating GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7. The model used a greedy approach to slide tiles on grids ranging from 10×10 to 30×30, outperforming Western frontier labs. Kimi K2.6 is open-weights and publicly available from Moonshot AI.written, reviewed, cited
  • Nvidia's Nemotron Super 3 produced code with a syntax error that prevented connection to the game server.
  • Muse Spark claimed every visible word regardless of length, resulting in a cumulative score of −15,309.
  • MiMo V2-Pro never slid a single tile because its threshold for positive value was never triggered.
github.com2026-01-30authorityHN front pageabout the Kimi familyHN 388 pts · 141 comments
All coverage tracked for this model (15) — append-only, nothing is ever removed
TitleSourcePublishedFirst seenSignals
Kimi K3 (2.8T) at 1 token/s on a MacBook Pro, streamed from four SSDsgithub.com2026-09-082026-10-07hn
Smaller, faster, safer: running Kimi and GLM at scaleblog.cloudflare.com2026-08-032026-10-07hn
Kimi K3-256kkimi.com official2026-07-292026-10-07hn
Kimi-K3 Technical Report [pdf]github.com2026-07-272026-10-07hn
Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmarksimonwillison.net2026-07-172026-10-07hn
Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challengethinkpol.ca2026-05-032026-10-07hn
Kimi vendor verifier – verify accuracy of inference providerskimi.com official2026-04-202026-10-07hn
Kimi K2.6: Advancing open-source codingkimi.com official2026-04-202026-10-07hn
Kimi K2.5 Technical Report [pdf]github.com2026-01-302026-10-07hn
Kimi Released Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual SOTA-Agentic Modelkimi.com official2026-01-272026-10-07hn
Kimi K2 1T model runs on 2 512GB M3 Ultrastwitter.com2025-12-142026-10-07hn
Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning modelmoonshotai.github.io2025-11-062026-10-07hn
Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecturegithub.com2025-10-312026-10-07hn
Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language modelgithub.com2025-07-122026-10-07hn
Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language modeltwitter.com2025-07-112026-10-07hn

Papers

1 paper

Papers 1

arXiv links found in the model card and its tags. "Peer-reviewed" is shown only with evidence: a published venue in OpenAlex (measured) or the authors' own journal reference on arXiv (reported).

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Sources

3 sources

Sources

Hub snapshot: 2026-10-25 · HF API: 2026-10-24 21:40 UTC · Providers: 2026-10-24 21:44 UTC · Articles: 2026-10-24 21:46 UTC · Summary: 2026-10-07 15:11 UTC · Last verified 2026-10-25

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