> First, we aim not to release open weights that would extend the absolute frontier of cyber capability. K3.1 Pro's offensive cyber capability is, by design, below what our pipeline can produce, and remains behind that of frontier proprietary models. Second, we intend to progressively raise the cyber capability available in open weights.
So they admit that they could do more, but they won't?
It's not actively nerfed like the Western frontier models, it's just downweighting offensive "cyber" as a domain for post-training/fine tuning. Which, if anything, ought to improve model capabilities wrt. other domains.
Or it's a cop out. I could totally outrun Usain Bolt, but by design I don't push to set new World Records. I will increasingly show faster times though.
Well, in the publication they claim to have identified specific cybersecurity post training tasks that nerfed capabilities when they removed them, which seems like a reasonable methodology.
Seeing as no one besides blackhats want frontier cybercrime capability to be open source, this seems like a very sensible thing to do.
So they have published a reasonable means, and they have a motive. I'd put my money on "probably true".
Yeah that's a huge downside. That the model does the task without tripping over its own feet, like discovering a vulnerability the model itself accidentally built 15 minutes ago and triggering its own guardrails, made the Chinese models attractive to use for security-adjacent things. Also useful to red-team your own stuff. While I can understand the reasoning behind it (and I guess having a model that's really good at both offense and defense released into the ether could lead to CCP asking some very pointed questions if Moonshot managed to get blamed for some incident stemming from their model's misuse) it's still a huge disappointment.
I don't want to give US labs the results of my DNA tests and my family tree going back to the 16th century just to secure my shitty app, but if the Chinese are bowing out as well it seems the only alternative is to admit that some script kiddie with a bunch of tokens will just pwn you now and then.
> I don't want to give US labs the results of my DNA tests
My friend, you realize that if you have had blood drawn for a genetic test, there is a very decent probability that the sequencing was done by a Chinese lab operating in the US, right? The Chinese probably have more US genomes that the US does.
Also, illumina used to ship products with hardcoded S3 access, so purchasers of used equipment could gain access to sequencing information generated by the original owners. Too many links to cover all of it, here's the Gemini summary:
I've not tried it out, but in the past I've been pretty disappointed in the performance of Kimi models. Deepseek, Qwen, and GLM all appear to perform much better even though Kimi often has higher benchmark scores. Ditto for Mimo.
The older Kimi K models (2.5 and 2.6) weren't bad for the time, but all of their models have had problems with overthinking. This also makes them significantly more expensive in practice than their pricing suggests, since they produce way more output (reasoning) tokens than most other models. Anecdotally, I've also had problems with all the pre-K3 models thinking themselves in circles trying to solve very simple problems that other models didn't struggle with. (I haven't played with K3 much because it's just too expensive.)
definitely not frontier though, as even on max both legs are in front of the frame; although I am wondering how much getting that right correlates with model intelligence.
If you are expecting any sort of usable limits on their subscription plan I suggest adjusting your expectations. I subscribed to $99 a month plan and within 47 minutes with one session (not asking for swarms or anything) was limited by 5-hour quota.
Interesting that they specifically nerf cyper-capabilities of open weight models:
"In preliminary experiments on internal models, we found that without data removal at either the mid-training or the RL stage, downstream cyber capability would increase substantially. These findings gave us a concrete lever for control. For the open-weight release of K3.1 Pro, we identified and removed cyber-related data from both training stages, while retaining the general-purpose coding tasks needed for model usefulness."
It's a bit fascinating to me how all of these labs have rolled their own (it sounds like) completely unique RL environments.
I wonder how much the industry will centralize around a few key patterns, and if we'll start to see some RL framework projects gain traction and be used by the bigger labs
It would be super useful to have more specific analyses of what areas the model is good at. I'd like to know when I should reach for this model instead of Anthropic's or OpenAI's.
For example, Opus 5.5 is better at UI design than Sol. Anyone who has used both models knows that, but it's not something you can look up anywhere.
I'm sure that there's a need for this kind of benchmarking, not just for coding.
Not sure if this is benchmarkable besides for the own person deciding which one they like more. Models difference is more about taste, preferences and prompt style.
Extrapolating a bit, Moonshot AI provides Kimi K3 at $15 / $3 / $0.3 per million output/input/cached tokens. A 30% reduction would put K3.1 at roughly $12 / $2.4 / $0.24.
So Kimi K3.1 Pro would be generally competitive with the latest Sol and Opus models on API pricing. And that's before factoring in third-party providers, some of which serve Kimi K3 for significantly less than Moonshot. For example, inference.net offers K3 for $10.80 / $0.239 / $0.21.
(One caveat: A Claude or GPT subscription still gives you way more value compared to API pricing.)
Exciting times in any case! We really need more direct competition to OpenAI and Anthropic.
So, the US economy spends trillions of dollars to be at the "frontier" and China puts out a model that basically does the same thing, for free, and for a tiny fraction of the development cost. How is this sustainable?
It's not like US companies spend trillions on training itself.
Mostly it's datacenter build out and circular financing magic when the same dollars being commited multiple times by multiple companies passing hot potato to each other. They basically commit capacities 2-3 years ahead.
There would be no Chinese model without US models to distill though. So, in a way, the Chinese models also cost a trillion dollars, they just don’t cost China that much.
I wish Opus 5.5 had an alternative just for the sake of not having a monopoly, but I have yet to see a model live up to its benchmark scores except for Fable and Opus; there is something about Anthropic that no other lab has.
looks extremely impressive, the full benchmark table isn't opening for some reason though so do we really have agi if small important things like that keep breaking?
> Kimi K3.1 Pro is a post-trained version of Kimi K3, with substantially larger post-training compute.
It's very nice that we entered a time where models are large enough and we can push the frontier just by training them longer.
When the next generation of gardware comes the ones on the smaller size will be running on a computer that might cost as little as a good car.
So after a home and a car, next major family purchase might be personal AI. And when the robots get good, pehraps in a decade, a fourth major purchase might pop up that will pair nicely with the third one.
Why would a family need an AI? Maybe it's the same kind of question as why would it need a personal computer.
> For the open-weight release of K3.1 Pro, we identified and removed cyber-related data from both training stages, while retaining the general-purpose coding tasks needed for model usefulness. We will continue to apply appropriate controls at every training stage, of which cyber-related data identification and restriction is one example.
When the frontier is pacing itself in its speed in terms of adding new capabilities (notice how fast opus 5.5 got released after Astra), then that also means that the open weights models which were just behind are accelerating in their speed just as much as well.
Good news for us because the models which used to feel 6 months behind now feel like they are lesser.
Double threat to Anthropic and OAI because if open weights models become good enough at the current level of Sota while being cheaper (which time will tell if this model fits the bill or not), then people will use those models instead of OAI/Anthropic provided it is "good enough"
Though it has to be said that only real world use case can be trusted but I remain optimistic and hope that this turns out to be good in real world use cases as well.
But in my opinion, all of this is really good for us end users!
I read somewhere that Chinese SOTA work better in chinese, and worse for English or other languages.
I rarely use any other languages but English for LLM tasks for reasons of sharing across the world.
Maybe that explains Chinese models been shit for me. Don't tell me the bench marks here are based on Chinese languages only.
Unless I see the diff, I won't use more Chinese models be it cheaper or faster since I can't get the same perf/intelligence with English.
That's something which caught my attention:
> First, we aim not to release open weights that would extend the absolute frontier of cyber capability. K3.1 Pro's offensive cyber capability is, by design, below what our pipeline can produce, and remains behind that of frontier proprietary models. Second, we intend to progressively raise the cyber capability available in open weights.
So they admit that they could do more, but they won't?
It's not actively nerfed like the Western frontier models, it's just downweighting offensive "cyber" as a domain for post-training/fine tuning. Which, if anything, ought to improve model capabilities wrt. other domains.
Or it's a cop out. I could totally outrun Usain Bolt, but by design I don't push to set new World Records. I will increasingly show faster times though.
Well, in the publication they claim to have identified specific cybersecurity post training tasks that nerfed capabilities when they removed them, which seems like a reasonable methodology.
Seeing as no one besides blackhats want frontier cybercrime capability to be open source, this seems like a very sensible thing to do.
So they have published a reasonable means, and they have a motive. I'd put my money on "probably true".
They don't want to be banned, and maybe their best offensive cyber capability models will be for their govt.
Kimi is the closest Chinese equivalent of Anthropic.
This doesn't seem particularly notable and is in line with Anthropic and OpenAI's approach of restricting release/access to more capable models.
It is notable in that it’s the first time an open Chinese company openly stated they were reducing intelligence for “safety”.
“Our lock can be picked by the robot.” We ban the robot instead of fixing the lock. It’s shortsighted.
All it takes is one idiot who happens to have the resources to "pWm Teh Interwebs" to scare both the US and Chinese governments.
Yeah that's a huge downside. That the model does the task without tripping over its own feet, like discovering a vulnerability the model itself accidentally built 15 minutes ago and triggering its own guardrails, made the Chinese models attractive to use for security-adjacent things. Also useful to red-team your own stuff. While I can understand the reasoning behind it (and I guess having a model that's really good at both offense and defense released into the ether could lead to CCP asking some very pointed questions if Moonshot managed to get blamed for some incident stemming from their model's misuse) it's still a huge disappointment.
I don't want to give US labs the results of my DNA tests and my family tree going back to the 16th century just to secure my shitty app, but if the Chinese are bowing out as well it seems the only alternative is to admit that some script kiddie with a bunch of tokens will just pwn you now and then.
> I don't want to give US labs the results of my DNA tests
My friend, you realize that if you have had blood drawn for a genetic test, there is a very decent probability that the sequencing was done by a Chinese lab operating in the US, right? The Chinese probably have more US genomes that the US does.
https://pandorareport.org/the-gryphon-scientific-biosecurity...
Also, illumina used to ship products with hardcoded S3 access, so purchasers of used equipment could gain access to sequencing information generated by the original owners. Too many links to cover all of it, here's the Gemini summary:
https://share.google/aimode/4JLsHpeRCWlVqU8qT
On the surface that seems like a responsible thing to do
The more interesting question is how much more performance can be squeezed out by post training the open weights through RL.
Tech blog and benchmark scores now available here: https://www.kimi.ai/blog/kimi-k3-1-pro
It appears to be generally frontier-level.
Their benchmark result table is broken in Firefox.
That's quite an impressive jump
This is insane. Can we switch the linked page to this?
I've not tried it out, but in the past I've been pretty disappointed in the performance of Kimi models. Deepseek, Qwen, and GLM all appear to perform much better even though Kimi often has higher benchmark scores. Ditto for Mimo.
The older Kimi K models (2.5 and 2.6) weren't bad for the time, but all of their models have had problems with overthinking. This also makes them significantly more expensive in practice than their pricing suggests, since they produce way more output (reasoning) tokens than most other models. Anecdotally, I've also had problems with all the pre-K3 models thinking themselves in circles trying to solve very simple problems that other models didn't struggle with. (I haven't played with K3 much because it's just too expensive.)
Yep, and often actually very expensive to use. More expensive than the frontier models because there's no realistic coding plan.
If those are true then wow
Holy fuck
That's nuts.
Pricing is here: https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/pricing/chat#model-pricing
kimi-k3.1-pro $2.00 / MTok $10.00 / MTok
cached: $0.20 / MTok $2.00 / MTok $4.00 / MTok
This is a price drop from Kimi K3 ($3/$15/$0.30) despite being a slightly larger model (3T vs. 2.8T params).
I'm glad I waited a day to post my analysis of LLM price cuts because it needs...an addition.
Are we sure this is a new pretrain and not them rounding up 2.8T?
The Kimi K3 announcement (https://www.kimi.ai/blog/kimi-k3) used 2.8T and it would be weird to round that up for this announcement.
it's almost certainly rounding up 2.8T
Pelicans are solid: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
Here's Kimi K3 for comparison, though I didn't try that on different reasoning levels: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
Update: I ran all three reasoning levels against K3 again: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
definitely not frontier though, as even on max both legs are in front of the frame; although I am wondering how much getting that right correlates with model intelligence.
If you are expecting any sort of usable limits on their subscription plan I suggest adjusting your expectations. I subscribed to $99 a month plan and within 47 minutes with one session (not asking for swarms or anything) was limited by 5-hour quota.
Interesting that they specifically nerf cyper-capabilities of open weight models:
"In preliminary experiments on internal models, we found that without data removal at either the mid-training or the RL stage, downstream cyber capability would increase substantially. These findings gave us a concrete lever for control. For the open-weight release of K3.1 Pro, we identified and removed cyber-related data from both training stages, while retaining the general-purpose coding tasks needed for model usefulness."
Ah, the version available to us mortals is nerfed in cybersecurity just like the US models :(
It seems that GLM-5.3 is still the go-to for cybersecurity.
It's a bit fascinating to me how all of these labs have rolled their own (it sounds like) completely unique RL environments.
I wonder how much the industry will centralize around a few key patterns, and if we'll start to see some RL framework projects gain traction and be used by the bigger labs
P.S. weights by November 4th
Eh, not necessarily, many of the RL vendors sell to Chinese labs, too: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/glm-53-how-chinese-labs-keep-...
55 on AAI, really awesome
Great! next week we'll get Astra 6.1 and Fable 5.2
It would be super useful to have more specific analyses of what areas the model is good at. I'd like to know when I should reach for this model instead of Anthropic's or OpenAI's.
For example, Opus 5.5 is better at UI design than Sol. Anyone who has used both models knows that, but it's not something you can look up anywhere.
I'm sure that there's a need for this kind of benchmarking, not just for coding.
idk, openai has alot of apple designers and their prototypes
Is that good or bad?
how biased you are?
Not sure if this is benchmarkable besides for the own person deciding which one they like more. Models difference is more about taste, preferences and prompt style.
Looking at their pricing page for China, K3.1 seems to be about 30% cheaper than K3.
--
Model K3.1 Pro K3.1 Pro Highspeed. K3
Input ¥13.00 ¥26.00 ¥20.00
Output ¥68.00 ¥136.00 ¥100.00
Cache hit ¥1.30 ¥1.30 ¥2.00
Cache write ¥13.00 ¥26.00 ¥20.00
How do their numbers compare with Anthropic and OpenAI?
Extrapolating a bit, Moonshot AI provides Kimi K3 at $15 / $3 / $0.3 per million output/input/cached tokens. A 30% reduction would put K3.1 at roughly $12 / $2.4 / $0.24.
For comparison:
So Kimi K3.1 Pro would be generally competitive with the latest Sol and Opus models on API pricing. And that's before factoring in third-party providers, some of which serve Kimi K3 for significantly less than Moonshot. For example, inference.net offers K3 for $10.80 / $0.239 / $0.21.(One caveat: A Claude or GPT subscription still gives you way more value compared to API pricing.)
Exciting times in any case! We really need more direct competition to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Opus 5.5 is about the same price as Kimi K3.1 Pro Highspeed.
Not the point, but did Kimi announce this at Saturday 1 AM in China? Weird timing for a model drop.
So, the US economy spends trillions of dollars to be at the "frontier" and China puts out a model that basically does the same thing, for free, and for a tiny fraction of the development cost. How is this sustainable?
It's not like US companies spend trillions on training itself.
Mostly it's datacenter build out and circular financing magic when the same dollars being commited multiple times by multiple companies passing hot potato to each other. They basically commit capacities 2-3 years ahead.
There would be no Chinese model without US models to distill though. So, in a way, the Chinese models also cost a trillion dollars, they just don’t cost China that much.
I wish Opus 5.5 had an alternative just for the sake of not having a monopoly, but I have yet to see a model live up to its benchmark scores except for Fable and Opus; there is something about Anthropic that no other lab has.
The announcement page is very extra: https://www.kimi.ai/blog/kimi-k3-1-pro
looks extremely impressive, the full benchmark table isn't opening for some reason though so do we really have agi if small important things like that keep breaking?
It's broken for me in Firefox, worked with Chrome.
Hallu Bench Hard: K3 at 23.4%, K3.1 at 8.3% which is very nice improvement!
Maybe this was why the “AI trade” was weak this week.
Wow.
> Kimi K3.1 Pro is a post-trained version of Kimi K3, with substantially larger post-training compute.
It's very nice that we entered a time where models are large enough and we can push the frontier just by training them longer.
When the next generation of gardware comes the ones on the smaller size will be running on a computer that might cost as little as a good car.
So after a home and a car, next major family purchase might be personal AI. And when the robots get good, pehraps in a decade, a fourth major purchase might pop up that will pair nicely with the third one.
Why would a family need an AI? Maybe it's the same kind of question as why would it need a personal computer.
> For the open-weight release of K3.1 Pro, we identified and removed cyber-related data from both training stages, while retaining the general-purpose coding tasks needed for model usefulness. We will continue to apply appropriate controls at every training stage, of which cyber-related data identification and restriction is one example.
Lame.
That's incredible
No AA scores yet.
This is a frontier level model and is at worst 1 month behind Anthropic and OpenAI.
Which is also gonna be open weights on 4 Nov.
When the frontier is pacing itself in its speed in terms of adding new capabilities (notice how fast opus 5.5 got released after Astra), then that also means that the open weights models which were just behind are accelerating in their speed just as much as well.
Good news for us because the models which used to feel 6 months behind now feel like they are lesser.
Double threat to Anthropic and OAI because if open weights models become good enough at the current level of Sota while being cheaper (which time will tell if this model fits the bill or not), then people will use those models instead of OAI/Anthropic provided it is "good enough"
Though it has to be said that only real world use case can be trusted but I remain optimistic and hope that this turns out to be good in real world use cases as well.
But in my opinion, all of this is really good for us end users!
"We Must Pace the Frontier"?
This probably doesn't move the frontier, it just sits at the current frontier (opus 5.5).
Chinese models never agreed to the pacing anyway lol.
Maybe not the raw intelligence/bench frontier but probably the cost per intelligence frontier.
Not for sub prices (Claude plan is way cheaper than Kimi API prices)
"We must start a cartel with Google, Meta, and OpenAI"
I'll wait for the pelican benchmark.