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Kimi K3 currently offers only one reasoning effort level, 'max,' which makes it expensive to run: it burned 13,241 reasoning tokens to produce just 3,417 tokens of output, costing 25 cents for a single pelican SVG.
Running the pelican prompt through K3 showed the model only supports one, costly 'max' reasoning setting, spending far more tokens on reasoning than on the actual output. ✦ AI generated
Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-16 · original ↗
It only has one reasoning effort right now, "max" - and it shows. The model consumed 13,241 reasoning tokens to output 3,417 tokens of response. This is expensive - the pelican cost 25 cents!
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extends → Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's most capable model to date, a 2.8 trillion parameter model being called the first open 3T-class model, surpassing DeepSeek's 1.6T v4 Pro.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblogrebuts → Kimi K3 hit 1668 Elo on GDPval v2, 53% and #1 on AutomationBench-AA, and 1547 Elo on AA-Briefcase, at $0.94 cost per task and about 21% fewer output tokens than K2.6 across the full Intelligence Index run.Artificial Analysis · Latent Spaceexplains mechanism → Kimi K3's benchmark story might be overstated unless validated on hidden or uncontaminated evals like LiveBench, and if the model 'thinks forever,' its real-world cost could end up less favorable than advertised.Bindu Reddy · Latent Space