Comment by zeroxfe 2 days ago
I've been using this model (as a coding agent) for the past few days, and it's the first time I've felt that an open source model really competes with the big labs. So far it's been able to handle most things I've thrown at it. I'm almost hesitant to say that this is as good as Opus.
Out of curiosity, what kind of specs do you have (GPU / RAM)? I saw the requirements and it's a beyond my budget so I am "stuck" with smaller Qwen coders.
I'm not running it locally (it's gigantic!) I'm using the API at https://platform.moonshot.ai
Just curious - how does it compare to GLM 4.7? Ever since they gave the $28/year deal, I've been using it for personal projects and am very happy with it (via opencode).
There's no comparison. GLM 4.7 is fine and reasonably competent at writing code, but K2.5 is right up there with something like Sonnet 4.5. it's the first time I can use an open-source model and not immediately tell the difference between it and top-end models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Kimi k2.5 is a beast, speaks very human like (k2 was also good at this) and completes whatever I throw at it. However, the glm quarterly coding plan is too good of a deal. The Christmas deal ends today, so I’d still suggest to stick to it. There will always come a better model.
From what people say, it's better than GLM 4.7 (and I guess DeepSeek 3.2)
But it's also like... 10x the price per output token on any of the providers I've looked at.
I don't feel it's 10x the value. It's still much cheaper than paying by the token for Sonnet or Opus, but if you have a subscribed plan from the Big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) it's much better value for $$.
Comes down to ethical or openness reasons to use it I guess.
Very much so. I'm using it for small personal stuff on my home PC. Nothing grand. Not having to worry about token usage has been great (previously was paying per API use).
I haven't stress tested it with anything large. Both at work and home, I don't give much free rein to the AI (e.g. I examine and approve all code changes).
Lite plan doesn't have vision, so you cannot copy/paste an image there. But I can always switch models when I need to.
It is possible to run locally though ... I saw a video of someone running one of the heavily quantized versions on a Mac Studio, and performing pretty well in terms of speed.
I'm guessing a 256GB Mac Studio, costing $5-6K, but that wouldn't be an outrageous amount to spend for a professional tool if the model capability justified it.
> It is possible to run locally though
> running one of the heavily quantized versions
There is night and day difference in generation quality between even something like 8-bit and "heavily quantized" versions. Why not quantize to 1-bit anyway? Would that qualify as "running the model?" Food for thought. Don't get me wrong: there's plenty of stuff you can actually run on 96 GB Mac studio (let alone on 128/256 GB ones) but 1T-class models are not in that category, unfortunately. Unless you put four of them in a rack or something.
You can run it on consumer grade hardware right now, but it will be rather slow. NVMe SSDs these days have a read speed of 7 GB/s (EDIT: or even faster than that! Thank you @hedgehog for the update), so it will give you one token roughly every three seconds while crunching through the 32 billion active parameters, which are natively quantized to 4 bit each. If you want to run it faster, you have to spend more money.
Some people in the localllama subreddit have built systems which run large models at more decent speeds: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/
You need 600gb of VRAM + MEMORY (+ DISK) to fit the model (full) or 240 for the 1b quantized model. Of course this will be slow.
Through moonshot api it is pretty fast (much much much faster than Gemini 3 pro and Claude sonnet, probably faster than Gemini flash), though. To get similar experience they say at least 4xH200.
If you don't mind running it super slow, you still need around 600gb of VRAM + fast RAM.
It's already possible to run 4xH200 in a domestic environment (it would be instantaneous for most tasks, unbelievable speed). It's just very very expensive and probably challenging for most users, manageable/easy for the average hacker news crowd.
Expensive AND hard to source high end GPUs, if you manage to source for the old prices around 200 thousand dollars to get maximum speed I guess, you could probably run decently on a bunch of high end machines, for let's say, 40k (slow).
Open source models can be hosted by provider, in particular plenty of educational institutions host open source models. You get to choose whatever provider you trust. For instance I used DeepSeek R1 a fair bit last year but never on deepseek.com or through its API.
Open source models costs are determined only by electricity usage, as anyone can rent a GPU qnd host them Closed source models cost x10 more just because they can A simple example is Claude Opus, which costs ~1/10 if not less in Claude Code that doesn't have that price multiplier
API costs on these big models over private hosts tend to be a lot less than API calls to the big 4 American platforms. You definitely get more bang for your buck.
You could run the full, unquantized model at high speed with 8 RTX 6000 Blackwell boards.
I don't see a way to put together a decent system of that scale for less than $100K, given RAM and SSD prices. A system with 4x H200s would cost more like $200K.
Did you use Kimi Code or some other harness? I used it with OpenCode and it was bumbling around through some tasks that Claude handles with ease.
Are you on the latest version? They pushed an update yesterday that greatly improved Kimi K2.5’s performance. It’s also free for a week in OpenCode, sponsored by their inference provider
I've been using it with opencode. You can either use your kimi code subscription (flat fee), moonshot.ai api key (per token) or openrouter to access it. OpenCode works beautifully with the model.
Edit: as a side note, I only installed opencode to try this model and I gotta say it is pretty good. Did not think it'd be as good as claude code but its just fine. Been using it with codex too.
I tried to use opencode for kimi k2.5 too but recently they changed their pricing from 200 tool requests/5 hour to token based pricing.
I can only speak from the tool request based but for some reason anecdotally opencode took like 10 requests in like 3-4 minutes where Kimi cli took 2-3
So I personally like/stick with the kimi cli for kimi coding. I haven't tested it out again with OpenAI with teh new token based pricing but I do think that opencode might add more token issue.
Kimi Cli's pretty good too imo. You should check it out!
Running it via https://platform.moonshot.ai -- using OpenCode. They have super cheap monthly plans at kimi.com too, but I'm not using it because I already have codex and claude monthly plans.
Where? https://www.kimi.com/code starts at $19/month, which is same as the big boys.
so there's a free plan at moonshot.ai that gives you some number of tokens without paying?
> Can you share how you're running it?
Not OP, but I've been running it through Kagi [1]. Their AI offering is probably the best-kept secret in the market.
https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/kimi-k2.5
Requirements are listed.
To save everyone a click
> The 1.8-bit (UD-TQ1_0) quant will run on a single 24GB GPU if you offload all MoE layers to system RAM (or a fast SSD). With ~256GB RAM, expect ~10 tokens/s. The full Kimi K2.5 model is 630GB and typically requires at least 4× H200 GPUs. If the model fits, you will get >40 tokens/s when using a B200. To run the model in near full precision, you can use the 4-bit or 5-bit quants. You can use any higher just to be safe. For strong performance, aim for >240GB of unified memory (or combined RAM+VRAM) to reach 10+ tokens/s. If you’re below that, it'll work but speed will drop (llama.cpp can still run via mmap/disk offload) and may fall from ~10 tokens/s to <2 token/s. We recommend UD-Q2_K_XL (375GB) as a good size/quality balance. Best rule of thumb: RAM+VRAM ≈ the quant size; otherwise it’ll still work, just slower due to offloading.
Been using K2.5 Thinking via Nano-GPT subscription and `nanocode run` and it's working quite nicely. No issues with Tool Calling so far.
I tried kimi k2.5 and first I didn't really like it. I was critical of it but then I started liking it. Also, the model has kind of replaced how I use chatgpt too & I really love kimi 2.5 the most right now (although gemini models come close too)
To be honest, I do feel like kimi k2.5 is the best open source model. It's not the best model itself right now tho but its really price performant and for many use cases might be nice depending on it.
It might not be the completely SOTA that people say but it comes pretty close and its open source and I trust the open source part because I feel like other providers can also run it and just about a lot of other things too (also considering that iirc chatgpt recently slashed some old models)
I really appreciate kimi for still open sourcing their complete SOTA and then releasing some research papers on top of them unlike Qwen which has closed source its complete SOTA.
Thank you Kimi!
Also my experience. I've been going back and forth between Opus and Kimi for the last few days, and, at least for my CRUD webapps, I would say they are both on the same level.