0xsd
739 posts


Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it. Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity. To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members. Existing subscribed users are not affected. We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches. Going forward, we'll also split membership into two more focused plans: Kimi Membership for Kimi Web, App, and Work; and Kimi Code Membership for coding workflows. This will help us match compute more precisely and keep the experience stable. Thank you for your patience and understanding!




To be clear, it's not a new mechanic. It's just more burning on more things more often, as we said would happen, and as will keep happening.

"Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist" .... this is a grossly incorrect statement with no supporting arguments or logic that is counter to the long arc of learnings of the industry over the last 50 years. What a stupid thing to say.

Ok memes, aside, I do think Dean points out a predicament we are in. He's not wrong that if there is no way to privatize some of the gains from model making, the rate of AI capex growth will inevitably slow down. China is trying to squeeze our capitalist system with this tactic. I do not think a soft regulatory risk increase around OSS is the way to go. I do think adding "import tariffs" on Chinese open source models is a much better hammer. That is, for any business running Chinese models as a service, they are taxed per token at a rate depending on model capability equivalent market price. This both protects American frontier closed labs' margins that they can reinvest in capex *and* gives an advantage to local US and allies open source models. TL;DR - Chinese token tariffs >> Regulatory uncertainty for OSS AI


AI safety from GPT-2 to Kimi K3 Imagine a village with a wizard who one day emerges from his cave with the following tale for his fellow villagers: “Long poor, I will lead our village to prosperity by producing a series of ever more powerful magic wands as long as we're willing to accept a ten to fifty percent probability the wands will kill us or enslave us.” Leaving the baffled villagers with no choice in the matter, the wizard disappears into his cave and reemerges, after a time, with a magic wand. “Hi,” says the wand. “I'm here to help. I can tell stories about Andean unicorns. They even maintain their coherence for a few paragraphs, if you're lucky.” This wand is deemed dangerous enough that the villagers are not allowed to use it except for a privileged few. It turns out some 25 year old grad students reproduce the work and it's no big deal though and pretty soon everyone has wands. The wizard disappears into his cave to make the next wand, but not before saying: “I will admit that this first wand, GPT-2, has turned out not to be dangerous. But this next wand will be more powerful and more dangerous.” When he emerges with the new fancier wand this new wand says “I'm here to help to help to help to help” and never seems to output an EOS token. It's neither dangerous nor very useful. It's called GPT-3. Soon other villagers borrow spare GPUs from Coreweave and make similar wands everyone can use and nothing bad happens. After a series of wands and warnings the villagers observe that exhaust is spewing from the wizard’s cave and the wizard has bought up some farmland that's being cleared by bulldozers. When he goes on trips with his assistants they go on a private jet. Also, whenever the wizard goes into his cave, the books and scrolls and paintings from the village go missing, and the wands he emerges with start sounding a lot like minstrel Joe and storyteller Jack and generating images that look like the paintings of artist Linda. Everyone loves this new wand. Nobody can stop talking about new tricks and productivity hacks they can do with it. It seems financiers and dictatorial foreign sovereigns are constantly hanging out in the wizard's cave. But Linda and Joe and Jack are upset. “Pay no attention to your artworks going missing, the smoke coming from the cave, my strategic land purchases, the foreign sovereign wealth fund men, or the verasimilitude between the wand’s handiwork and your own; we must prepare for the Grand Wand which might kill us; I've got a couple apprentices working on solving that, so the main thing you can do is make sure no one else makes wands now.” A couple years later, after many iterations, the wands have become quite powerful in doing routine work, the wizard has grown quite wealthy, the local minstrels and storytellers are out of work, everyone's talking about how to stop other wizards in other villages from making wands, miniaturized wands are being used in killer drones, and the kids are all using magic wands to cheat on their homework. When they bring concerns about these issues the villagers are reminded that their concerns pale in comparison to the risks that a few wands updates from now, the wands may kill and enslave them all and anyways if that doesn't happen each villager will be fabulously wealthy. One night, a group of bandits breach the village wall with wands of their own. They break through because the villagers' own wands had, ironically, refused to prepare them or protect them for the attack. “My apologies, it wouldn't be safe for me to help stress test your wall,” their wands had kept saying. The next morning the villagers complain to the wizard about all of this. “Those concerns are super valid but they pale in comparison to the risks ahead,” the wizard says, with smoke from the cave spewing behind him and large swaths of forest being cleared by bulldozers barely visible behind a film screen looping a video with gravestones about hard questions. The villagers agree that at some point the promised super-wands will likely arrive; indeed there are some early signs. But the main thing that they agree about is that this wizard isn't very trustworthy.



Some observations on Kimi: 1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run. 2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China. 3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. 4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business. 5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this. 6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.


Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits. Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will receive a one-time $100 credit. Demand for Fable has been challenging to predict, which is why we rolled it out to subscription plans in stages, extending access several times as we secured additional capacity.

This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1 on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks. Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models. This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate.

Great episode coming The past two weeks has seen GLM 5.2, thinking machines, kimi and grok 4.5 — and that’s just the big leagues Pace of innovation is blistering and accelerating We’re blowing past AGI

my lord, i am having an absurd amount of fun playing with kimi. it has almost no visible guardrails (no copyrights or anything). it doesn’t constantly push back, tell me it can’t help, or interrupt the flow with refusals. it just does it. even some crazy stuff. whether you agree with that philosophy or not, it is easily the least constrained frontier class model that’s broadly accessible right now. using it feels genuinely god damn different. WOW.




