Kimi K3 is not cheap

Moonshot AI's new open-weights LLM Kimi K3 is not cheap, costing slightly less per task than OpenAI's top model but double the cost of GLM-5.2 and about 20 times more than DeepSeek V4, according to Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index benchmark. The model is a big step forward for Chinese LLMs and open-weights development, but claims that it is as good as US models at a fraction of the cost are incorrect.

Kimi K3 Is Not Cheap The new Chinese LLM is not what some people think. Kimi K3, the new open-weights LLM from Chinese lab Moonshot AI , dropped last week. It’s a powerful model that, perhaps inevitably, sparked debate — including accusations of ushering in decelerationist ‘ AI communism https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412?s=20 ’ whatever that means . Amidst the noise, a number of AI commentators including the Hard Fork guys and Scott Galloway have asserted that K3 is noteworthy because it’s nearly as good as US models, at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, they are wrong. Just because a model is Chinese, it is not magically cheap. And in fact, K3 isn’t cheap. Across Artificial Analysis’s ‘ Intelligence Index https://artificialanalysis.ai/ ’ benchmark, it cost slightly less per task than OpenAI’s top model. Compared to other Chinese models, it’s positively expensive - double the cost of GLM-5.2, and ~20x more than DeepSeek V4. There’s nuance, of course. Kimi costs less for coding https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents , but more for office work https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/aa-briefcase . It’s verbose, so it takes longer to solve problems. It’s open-weights, so you could with a few GPUs finetune it for your own purposes. But we’re not talking nuance here, this is just about one claim that I’ve seen/heard enough to find slightly annoying. In summary: Is K3 a big step forwards for Chinese LLMs and the open-weights people ? Yes . Is it concerning for the US market that a Chinese lab have fast-followed OpenAI and Anthropic with much less capex, possibly aided by distillation? Also yes . Is it cheap? No. No it isn’t. Please stop saying that. And please stop saying it’s another ‘DeepSeek moment’ too. Posted on July 26, 2026