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Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters, taught itself to design a chip to run a smaller version of itself, and d new signups three days after launch because it couldn’t handle demand. Here’s what it actually is — and what happened when I put it to work. #
On July 16, a Beijing-based lab called Moonshot AI released a model with 2.8 trillion parameters — by multiple independent accounts, the largest open-weight AI model ever built. Three days later, Moonshot d new signups because demand had pushed the system close to its processing limits. It arrived days before the 2026 Artificial Intelligence World Conference in Shanghai, and it’s called Kimi K3.
I’d read enough hype-driven model launches to be skeptical of headline numbers alone, so before writing about it, I actually used it — for real code generation, the thing I’d be trusting it with if any of this were true. I came away genuinely impressed. That surprised me a little, so let me walk through what K3 actually is, what the verified numbers say, and where my own experience lined up with them.