Kimi K3-256k

This was posted 38 minutes ago, and as of 20 minutes ago, several Anthropic services are now designated as having a "major outage".

Doubt these are related, but it made me laugh a little.

Hopefully this helps reduce some of the pressure on their infrastructure. Their models have all become super dumb recently and their support are not addressing it. I have a hunch they’ve been serving a significant percentage of requests with quantised models.

LLMs is quickly became commodities. US AI labs like OpenAI is losing their moat. Hyperscalers and data center owners who can sell cheap token will win

Wow. So kimi is suddenly half the price for all users until they hit 256k of context? Thats massive.

i've never had any issues with 256k context. see no reason to bump up to 1m if it comes at a premium.

That's actually nice! I usually try to stay below 200k context anyway.

This seems functionally similar to OpenAI having a step in pricing once you exceed a certain context length (also at 272k aka 2^18 aka 256k).

Having a lot of active context increases the per-token cost (flops issued and bytes read per token out) so it makes sense to pass that cost on to users. I'm actually surprised it's implemented as a hard cutoff instead of a smooth gradient.

> k3-256k is now available. Within 256k context, it delivers the same results. k3 (1M) consumes about twice as much quota as k3-256k.

This is just an API level change right? The model itself should be the same I think.

This isn't quantized, right? Just a smaller context?

Can we assume that model performance at 90% of the 256k limit != 90% of 1M token limit?

Is this the exact same model just with less VRAM allocated for context window?

Since Claude is the first time for me really, really out (TIL against my wished about https://status.claude.com/), I am now interested enough to see what else works. But ... when I click pricing, I see "Join a waitlist". Wtf? Are they really that good, so were totally surprised and overwhelmed by the requests, is this a marketing stunt, or do they just don't have the hardware being in china?

This is a fantastic option for swival.dev given its very efficient context management compared to e.g. Claude Code.

What is the purpose of this? Just a hard cutoff below the actual context window? You could set that in your harness anyway.

I can't seem to find pricing for this model. Since the context size is just a quarter of the full size K3, is the price also much cheaper?

I usually keep my context in chats below 256k anyways so this would be tremendous honestly.

A bit of topic. But how likely is it that the US will restrict Chinese open weight models and also force Euro countries to do the same? I think it will be effective within 6 months. The US is having a hard time staying competitive.

omg! new model!!

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Why are Anthropic and OpenAI even allowing their coding harness apps to be plugged into different model providers…? I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to clamp down on that by now.