Kimi K3 seems to be an open weights model that is true state of the art frontier. It was released on July 16, 2026, but its model weights are only expected to be publicly available by July 27, 2026! I have a bad feeling about this. Do you think my fear is unjustified?
they chicken out60.0%
they publish open weights40.0%
5 votes \ 1 day left
One theory floated by David Sacks is that the Chinese government wants these open to compress margins of the American closed models... that seems logical
It's also such a big model that there's not many entities that can actually host it, so they stand to lose less of their own hosting business
Also when Cursor based Composer off the prior version of Kimi, it was via license deal, so there's direct revenue to be had in opening it
Now Mira Murati's new thing seems to focus exactly on what Cursor did, enable orgs to post-train open models, which makes more Composer-like deals more likely
I think the incentives line up such that they do open it
I think they'll publish because otherwise they need to think up a pretty good reason to safe face. Honor culture works in the favor of the open weights consumer right now.
Secondly, although their own benchmarks put it at the top, it scores lower on other's benchmarks[1][2] vs both Fable and Sol and it's hard to judge usablity - they admitted as much as inferiority themselves in their publication. If they close up now, they lose the next iteration also - like Meta. So it'd be a huge risk.
I only had some low-end tasks for it thus far so I cannot comment on it yet, but I'll mix it into my upcoming real-world comparison next to GLM-5.2, Deepseek-4-Pro and Qwen-3.6-Max, where I baseline against Opus 4.8 performance.
https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text ↩
https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models ↩
Official reason "Dario is right, issa verrry dangerous uwu"
Actual reason: "There is so much money in closed weights and undercutting the competition"
oh... that's what you can tell to Americans whom would accept it and ask where to insert credit card - brrrrrrr.
I have difficulty imagining this being received well internally though, unless the narrative would be: "use GLM, it is better and free. We are now targeting foreigners to milk some moneys from their printer"