Moonshot AI released the full weights of its Kimi K3 model on Jul. 27, putting a 2.8 trillion parameter system into public hands for the first time. Key Points: Moonshot published the full we
Moonshot AI released the full weights of its Kimi K3 model on Jul. 27, putting a 2.8 trillion parameter system into public hands for the first time.
- Moonshot published the full weights of Kimi K3, the largest open-weight AI model released so far.
- The system carries 2.8 trillion total parameters but activates only 16 of its 896 experts per token.
- Investors valued Moonshot at $31.5 billion in a closing round, with $50 billion targeted before a Hong Kong listing.
Moonshot launched Kimi K3 on Jul. 16 through its API and consumer app, unveiling the model at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, then held the weights back for ten days.
The company had promised a full release by Jul. 27 in its technical blog, and it spent the gap aligning with inference partners and open source maintainers. Anyone with the hardware can now pull down roughly 594 gigabytes of quantized files.
The model holds 2.8 trillion total parameters but fires only 16 of its 896 experts on any given token, about 1.8 percent of the pool, alongside a 1 million token context window. Arena ranked it first in Frontend Code at 1,679 points, ahead of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, in blind developer testing, and Moonshot recommends serving it on clusters of 64 accelerators or more.
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The reaction from researchers was immediate.
Nathan Lambert, who writes the Interconnects newsletter, called K3 the strongest open model ever released. He argued that the distance between open and closed systems has narrowed from a debated six to nine months down to something closer to three to five. Open weights also cut into the margins that closed labs earn on systems nobody else can download and run.
Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said open weights let Moonshot borrow computing capacity that other companies have already paid to build out.
Dean Ball, OpenAI's head of strategic futures, took the opposite view and warned that a world running on downloadable models points toward what he called full AI communism.
Investors valued Moonshot at $31.5 billion in a round now closing, and the company wants as much as $50 billion in a final raise before a Hong Kong listing. Annual recurring revenue reached $300 million in June, up from $200 million in April, and daily sales have climbed at least sixfold since K3 went live.
Washington has meanwhile signaled that it will scrutinize foreign open source models for evidence of stolen intellectual property.
Yang Zhilin started Moonshot in 2023, and investors put the company's worth above $20 billion as recently as May, a mark it has since left well behind. K3 forced a pause on new subscriptions within days of launch, after demand outran the computing capacity Moonshot had on hand.
