Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
Willison says Kimi K3 is a serious 2.8T-parameter release, but his pelican test now mostly serves as a hands-on sanity check.
Moonshot says an open-weight release is due by July 27, 2026, with pricing at $3/million input tokens and $15/million output tokens. Willison’s pelican SVG run cost 25 cents, driven by 13,241 reasoning tokens, and suggested K3 may carry a large hidden system prompt. He says the benchmark is no longer a good way to compare top models, especially because it misses agentic tool use, but it still reveals cost, reasoning behavior, SVG validity, and whether he has actually tried the model. Simon Willison's note
Moonshot says an open-weight release is due by July 27, 2026, with pricing at $3/million input tokens and $15/million output tokens. Willison’s pelican SVG run cost 25 cents, driven by 13,241 reasoning tokens, and suggested K3 may carry a large hidden system prompt. He says the benchmark is no longer a good way to compare top models, especially because it misses agentic tool use, but it still reveals cost, reasoning behavior, SVG validity, and whether he has actually tried the model. Simon Willison's note
score 8