Kimi K3 Joins a Wave of Good-Enough AI Models

Kimi K3 is here, nearly the best and basically free. We do the math on how many hours of bicycle pedaling buys you ten minutes of AI. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 this week, an open weights model out of China that Moonshot itself pitches at roughly the level of Anthropic's Opus: really smart, not the smartest thing available. It joins a wave of releases making the same modest pitch. Thinking Machines launched Inkling with a note that it is "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed." Elon Musk's xAI shipped Grok 4.5, a point release. A year ago every AI launch claimed the