Kimi K3 in Practice: Real-World Impressions and Benchmark Comparisons

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Skip to main content How does Kimi k3 feel? Does it match up where it stands on benchmarks? : r/LocalLLaMA Advertise on Reddit Open chat Create Create post Open inbox Expand user menu Repost Go to “LocalLLaMA” r/LocalLLaMA • 1 month ago superSmitty9999 How does Kimi k3 feel? Does it match up where it stands on benchmarks? How does Kimi k3 feel? Does it match up with its benchmark standing in practice? Question | Help

I've seen the benchmarks, they supposedly right up there with Fable 5 and Sol 5.6. I've seen the benchmarks; supposedly it is right up there with Fable 5 and Sol 5.6.

Howerver I'm skeptical of benchmarks and the kimi k3 creators even mentioned the user experience isn't quite on par. However, I'm skeptical of benchmarks, and even the Kimi K3 creators mentioned that the user experience isn't quite on par.

How is K3 doing on coding? How is the personality? Does it's thinking and train of thought feel high quality or sort of insane? Common sense? How is K3 doing at coding? What is its personality like? Does its thinking and train of thought feel high quality or somewhat insane? What about common sense?

Trying to get a sense of the quality in real world use. I'm trying to get a sense of its quality in real-world use.

Share kalshi_official • Promoted 2028 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ODDS: Check today's latest moves on Kalshi.com Learn more kalshi.com Sort by: Comments eli_pizza • 1 month ago Top 1% commenter

Put a couple bucks in openrouter and you can try it. It’s good. Put a couple of bucks into OpenRouter and you can try it. It's good.

Reply Share mo-powerbuilder • 1 month ago

Is open router good? Is OpenRouter good?

Reply Share RecordingOk3922 • 1 month ago

I personally like it I personally like it

Reply Share eli_pizza • 1 month ago Top 1% commenter

I mean if you only want to use Kimi you can also just give them a few bucks and use it directly. But yes openrouter is good and lets you easily test pretty much any model through one endpoint. I mean, if you only want to use Kimi, you can also just give them a few bucks and use it directly. But yes, OpenRouter is good and lets you easily test pretty much any model through one endpoint.

Reply Share SporksInjected • 1 month ago Top 1% commenter

When the API is available When the API is available

Reply Share aboutthednm • 1 month ago

Is it not live here? Is it not live here?

https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3

Do I misunderstand what you're asking? Do I misunderstand what you're asking?

hidden2u • 1 month ago Top 1% commenter Regular-Anybody2645 • 1 month ago

The whole world wants to use it and nobody else is hosting until open weights on the 27th at the least.

eli_pizza • 1 month ago Top 1% commenter

It works though.

backyard_tractorbeam • 1 month ago

K3 is available on opencode go now too. Or, it's at least in the price list, haven't tried it.

LMTLS5 • 1 month ago

you can use it for free in their chat app too. it is indeed good

zeroccx • 27 days ago

Same. I didn’t really buy the hype until I used it myself. Honestly, if models like this keep coming out, the US should be more worried about staying competitive than trying to slow everyone else down by their nonsense restrictions

FBIFreezeNow • 1 month ago

Feels like Fab Fable’s younger brother and Opus 4.8’s uncle and Sonnet’s mom. It certainly doesn’t feel like it’s related to gpt family though

jeekp • 1 month ago

Thanksgiving is gonna be awkward this year

MeretrixDominum • 1 month ago

I should put aside $1000 and have a group chat with them all at the same tims and see who I can seduce first

PhantomGaming27249 • 1 month ago

Best ui model I have ever used and as good as 5.6 sol on the backend. Genuinely amazing model.

superSmitty9999 • 1 month ago

Can you specify more about what you asked it and your use case? Thanks!

PhantomGaming27249 • 1 month ago

GPU kernal optimization work and reworking a ui of a project I have been doing. Did excellent work on both tasks.

robkkni • 1 month ago

Wow! That's some non-trivial work!

superSmitty9999 • 27 days ago

Awesome that they don't sandbag you on AI work lol

u/Kurrent-dot-io • Promoted Capacitor is a free multiplayer shared coding session memory across Claude, Codex, Cursor, Pi, OpenCode and more. See more kurrent.io Admirable_Market2759 • 1 month ago Top 1% commenter

It lives up to the hype

ShelZuuz • 1 month ago

I gave it $100 today and told it to fix a Rust bug that I've just one-shot fixed with Fable on another machine in 15 minutes. Wanted to see what the equivalent cost would be for a direct comparison.

Then when I checked on it later it just ran itself out of credits and having gotten nowhere.

Exactly the same prompt as Fable. Basically described where an application output was drifting from the spec and told it to read the spec and look at the output then fix whatever is causing the application to not match the spec. It found the area in the spec, but then continued to read the spec (500 pages) for some unknown reason. And it made fixes which it was just guessing it without it being based on the spec.

I'm sure I can get it to write code if I hand it the correct C++ file and tell it what function to fix, like you would do with Haiku, but this model is supposed to compete with Fable head-on, not Haiku.

SentientPetriDish • 1 month ago

same model that crashed the S&P 500, lmao

hellomistershifty • 1 month ago

Yeah this was my experience with GLM-5.2. Just endless reading until the thinking hits the context limit, and repeat. Great for smaller stuff but hits a wall in a big codebase

ebolathrowawayy • 1 month ago martinerous • 1 month ago • 1 month ago Edited

Tried it on OpenRouter for a horror adventure roleplay. Surprising - it even speaks Latvian better than GLM (and Grok), but not as good as Gemini, GPT or Claude. Also, I liked how it builds the environment, feels less naive/cliche, when compared to Gemini, which I'm the most familiar with. Also, it followed my prompt instruction to make characters silent when they are alone. Gemini did not follow this, always wanting to "think aloud". Not good thing - coherence of characters actions somehow did not seem as good as Gemini Pro. Some stuff just did not make sense. It could be because of Latvian, and it might be better for English though.

And as it is smarter in general, it's also smarter with refusals - it picks up hints of things it doesn't like that potentially might lead to unethical behaviors. So, it will not play evil characters. I (naively) hope it's in the system prompt and not baked into the model.

And it's quite slow on OpenRouter. I imagine, the demand is huge now.

studansp • 1 month ago

Just wanted to say sveiks 🇱🇻 - Latvian American and that's all I know.

martinerous • 1 month ago

Thanks :) Yeah, we had quite many people leaving Latvia and finding their new home in the US during the tough war and USSR occupation times.

superSmitty9999 • 1 month ago

If you're running it on api via OpenRouter, you control the system prompt right? So it's probably just censored.

martinerous • 1 month ago

I think so, and that would be sad. But then, there might be hidden additional prompts or filters in-between the provider and OpenRouter. For example, Google have special content HarmCategory settings that are available in their direct API, and Gemini can become quite evil when all filters are turned down, but I suspect they are exposing Gemini on OpenRouter and elsewhere with more strict settings. Who knows, what Kimi providers are doing behind the scenes and if they have any filters...

u/RedditforBusiness • Promoted Reach 443M+ high-intent audiences on Reddit. Sign up ads.reddit.com TimAndTimi • 1 month ago

Mr. Dario responsed by making Fable 5 staying in Max amd Pro plans.

geteum • 1 month ago

I gave a try today in a code optimization I have solved recently but sol failed. It failed as well hahaha but it was interesting what it suggested. For this problema I spent around 10 dollars with sol and 2 with Kimi.

The issue is a double loop with two operations ordered in way that lead to a huge memory consumption. Altering the order is enough to reduce the memory by a factor of ten. I dont know why but no LLM can figure this.

rpeck • 1 month ago

Did you try hinting to them to think through the memory access pattern because you think that might be the problem? (aka is often the problem with inner loops like this)

is)

Temporary_Stick_6664 • 1 month ago

you're too smart bro

real_serviceloom • 1 month ago

So, I've been using it as my main model.. I do heavy backend work with Rust...

It definitely feels fable class. It is really good. It can also understand things very thoroughly, similar to feeble in that regard, where you can give it some sentence which makes sixty percent sense and can figure out what you mean exactly.

If I have to criticize it, maybe the only one is that it is really slow and it thinks quite a lot, but I think that's also because I haven't fully learned how to drive the model and that's something that comes with experience.

tomekza • 1 month ago

"feeble" 😂

real_serviceloom • 1 month ago

lmao just realized that typo. keeping it as i think its a good slip.

New_Alps_5655 • 1 month ago

So far I'd say it's exactly where the benchmarks show. Only a hair behind Fable at a fraction of the price.

Cupakov • 1 month ago

Haven’t tried it with coding tasks but with research it seems kind of hesitant to look stuff up. When reminded (or with a system prompt that emphasises search tools) it excels though, really impressed. I’m using it with GPT5.6 Sol as a fallback and it’s really hard for me to pick which produces better outputs.

ShamanJohnny • 1 month ago

Every model has its strengths. The strengths of this model are the Design,UI/UX, and writing. For everything else i would just use Sol.

matrik • 1 month ago • 1 month ago Edited

I tried documenting a complex and badly written repo with it. It did an amazing job, far beyond opus, without finding any excuses or shortcuts. Downside is that it consumed the 5h budget in about 10 minutes, so I had to upgrade from moderato (cheapest) to allegretto (2nd cheapest). The whole job took ~30 minutes, and t/s was around 10-15. I believe they are experiencing overload due to the hype.

I'm very satisfied with the end result, but it was a bit more expensive than I expected.

Overall, it convinced me to test it as a daily driver. It would have been so much better if I can run it on my hardware.

Southern_Sun_2106 • 1 month ago

If they don't screw around with model quality behind the API, like both OpenAI and Anthropic does, that in itself will be a reason to switch.

segmond • 1 month ago llama.cpp Top 1% commenter

send me some money and I'll try it and let you know.

superSmitty9999 • 1 month ago • 1 month ago Edited

What's your email and phone number I'll zelle it to you /s

NaiveDragonfruit • 1 month ago

where are the model weights

Any-Conference1005 • 1 month ago

27th

Ylsid • 1 month ago

It's good but waffles too muc ago • 1 month ago Edited

What's your email and phone number I'll zelle it to you /s

NaiveDragonfruit • 1 month ago

where are the model weights

Any-Conference1005 • 1 month ago

27th

Ylsid • 1 month ago

It's good but waffles too much

jarec707 • 1 month ago

Check out Ethan Mollick’s tweets: x or Bluesky. He provides a balanced view. TL;DR Kimi 3 is in a class below Fable and ChatGPT equivalent. Kimi made some significant errors in academic work. All in all a very good but not superb model.

PinEnvironmental6395 • 1 month ago

Read it. He is coping extremely hard. 

jarec707 • 1 month ago

I don't quite follow, say more? I've experienced him as a knowledgeable, experienced power user without an axe to grind.

DryWeb3875 • 1 month ago

So is it Ethan Bollicks?

RadioactiveBread • 28 days ago

No idea what these people are on about when they say its "definitely Fable class". If you think it's Fable class you aren't doing tasks that require Fable.

DauntingPrawn • 27 days ago

Opus 4.8 without the kvetching.

ketosoy • 1 month ago Top 1% commenter

In my minimal testing, it has lived up to the hype.

I tried it on an ascii art problem opus and gpt5.6 had both struggled with and it did great.

I also had it mock up a simple 3d education game “neon diner with tron vibes” and it nailed the vibe and the UI was legitimately good with 4 prompts.

NUMERIC__RIDDLE • 1 month ago

I like it. Sometimes it says some out-of-pocket shit. Honestly, it finally feels like a model that can actually replace all of my Claude use for me. And that's on vibes.

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