Hacker News Reader

Comment by applicative | Hacker News Reader

The price of Kimi K3 is 'monopolistically' determined by contract with Moonshot. The weights are nominally on Hugging Face but can only be provided under contract with Moonshot, which specifies what the price can be. So it will be with the next Alibaba behemoth and, I would think, all others forever.

Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.

The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.

View on HN

> The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.

No they are not. You can just ignore the contract. Unless you are a multi-billion dollar company, nobody will notice and you will get away with it.

You cannot ignore the contract unless you /are/ a multibillion dollar company and can run the model entirely internally. Or do you propose to run an instance of Kimi K3 on your laptop?

Fireworks, Together, etc - who are providing inference precisely /for/ Moonshot as underlaborers - arranged contracts of their own in the weeks before the release. The press and social media offensive ignored that the release of open weights was merely a starting pistol for a pre-arranged use of foreign providers no different from US models' use of AWS

It should be enought to dispel the strange illusion that providers are somehow independent free agents freely doing what they please with the free beer of Kimi K3 open weights that the prices on open router are within a couple pennies

> You cannot ignore the contract unless you /are/ a multibillion dollar company and can run the model entirely internally. Or do you propose to run an instance of Kimi K3 on your laptop?

I think that there is a large swath of people, companies, or groups, that are in between "Multi-billion dollar company", and someone running it on their laptop.

100k of hardware, that a group might already have sitting around, could probably do it continuously.

> The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.

Have you looked at the contract? There are zero conditions unless you've broken $20M in revenue with their model. It doesn't even forbid distillation, lol

> Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.

Releasing a big open-weights model is... le bad? Am I understanding you correctly?

There are small models out there if you want them, you know.

Yes releasing a big open weight model to the Sinaloa cartel is bad. One could say the same about releasing it to the US military, according to political taste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com