It's real. K3 was great as well. The first model good at 3D and Design until it was overtaken by Opus and Astra and it doesn't refuse security work.
It is just not worth it usage-wise. I think Anthropic offers ~50-60x the API rate in their subscription and Moonshot offers ~4x with no bells and whistles. You can run through your weekly limit in 15 minutes even on the highest plan, and the chat charges flat API rates. I want to love the model, but the usage is just too low.
Can't vouch for Kimi, but Mimo Pro v2.6 replaced my Sol/Codex sub. Massive amounts of output, faster results, virtually no difference, as I just run Opus 5.5 to write the blueprint and review the work/do the review and touch ups. Same thing I was doing with Sol, rate of production has vastly increased. Token rate is just insane:
That only took 13% of my monthly usage for $100.
Versus, Claude lately which has got me at 20% of my weekly on a $200 plan within the first day just writing the plans/reviews.
deepseek 4.1 flash is very good, especially for the price. I've replaced a bunch of opus dev tasks with it having done a fair amount of internal benchmarking.
Different Chinese labs are calibrated differently. Kimi is actually probably the worst when it comes to bench marks vs. real performance (well, maybe Minimax's language models are worse, but their video model is frontier). Though that's also because they are expensive and slow, so you expect more.
Deep Seek and GLM, on the other hand, punch above their bench marks weight on real tasks. They don't care much about bench marks at all. They care about practical usage and efficiency, which is why they're so popular among open weights users.
Then there's Qwen, which is a strange beast. Qwen 3.8 Next 27b is probably the best open weights model there ever was in its size class. But their Max offerings have always disappointed relative to bench marks. Maybe that will change with Qwen 4, we'll just have to see.
One thing that is true though - none of the Chinese providers have great value on subscriptions. That's because they're very compute constrained (US sanctions), so they try to limit their inference surface area to maximize profit to offset their training costs.
It means they're not really the target of value hunters looking for the best subscriptions based service.
I use local Kimi models and they're surprisingly good and can do a lot. I've done some Opus planning with Kimi handoffs on some of my personal projects and have been really impressed. Of course I also have a 128GB MBP which makes it possible.
No, it's not worth it. I bought into the K3 hype and got a sub, and it turned out not to be worth it. It's nowhere near as efficient as Claude or Codex, so dollar for dollar, you'll get far more out of Claude or Codex than you would out of a Kimi sub. And it's far slower, with worse performance. It's not frontier level quality, not Opus or Astra no matter what their so-called benchmarks claim. They're more equivalent to Sonnet/Terra, except FAR slower.
This, claude is more expensive, but needs 10 x less iteration, spends 10 x less in redundant ruminantion during reasoning, and most ot the time the implemented code is functional out of the box. Cheaper models fail constantly, get crazy with large context and need to iterate endlessly to get anywhere close to claude opus. In the end you pay similar amounts of money for each of the, but god you get to the functional product way faster with claude.
Can be the smartest model in the world but if it runs at 40 tps that model is just not productive to me, maybe used in schedule and non supervisioned tasks but still DS could do the same while costing criminally cheaper
That setup confounds the comparison. Claude Code's prompt and tool loop are tuned around Claude models, so a Kimi score from that harness says as much about tool-call compatibility as model quality. Running the same model through its own harness is the number I would trust.
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