They put a router model in front that predicts whether Kimi or Fable is going to give a better cost for a correct result. (They believe that ultimately such a router model should be continuously trained on your own workloads so it makes the best decisions for you).
Their router chose Kimi the majority of the time (72% in one category, all the way to 96% in another category), leading to cost savings in every category (from 1.5x to 50x depending).
Their "router" is an oracle reference point where they choose the lower cost model after running both and therefore knowing who passed the test. The cost savings part is only Fireworks theorizing what would happen if an equivalent predicting router exists. That's a big if.
I use DeepSeek exclusively and now Kimi K3 offers a great planning assistant for more advanced coding tasks.
DeepSeek v4 Flash is extremely fast and is able to handle pretty much anything I've thrown at it (I use mostly Rust, PSQL, Angular and Terraform).
I self host Bifrost as my LLM gateway, though I wish LLM vendors would do monthly/daily automatic billing (like VPS providers do) rather than prepaid + auto-top up.
It's annoying maintaining a non-refundable minimum balance across vendors, I would rather be billed for my exact usage.
OpenRouter helps, but I don't really like it as a service and not a fan of the mark up.
I have been a heavy user of k2.5/6 but they seem to have gotten slower and worse at their jobs (and the "engine overloaded" errors have increased ... ), and k3 spends a LOT of time thinking and doesn't produce noticeably better results. I do keep chucking some tasks over to moonshot every now and again to give it a chance. I figure they're under compute pressure and have probably quantised the models to cope temporarily.
But recently I've found myself mostly using deepseek v4 pro and gpt 5.5 when I need the big guns.
GLM 5.2 has been good at select tasks but really shit at others and given how sparingly I use GPT 5.5 I'm not that compelled to use it. I've yet to be impressed by any Google or Anthropic models!!
I don’t think that’s particularly out of the ordinary. Do people have different experiences with other harnesses? Which ones?
But sometimes not using the "best model" is using the best model. Fable isn't the best at everything. Specialization and optimizations might not just be around cost.
As a router, it's not very feature rich. For example I restricted the available models to the ones I want to use however the `/models` endpoint still lists all the models, making my LLM client list the 200+ models available on the service (even though they will throw an error if I try to use them).
With Bifrost, I can also create model aliases with custom configuration - for example I can create a model alias `deepseek-v4-flash-nothink` which disables thinking. I can create `deepseek-v4-flash-caveman` which injects the caveman skill (to save tokens) etc.
Plus I can contribute to Bifrost, which I can't do with OpenRouter.
The only reason I didn't go for it is I'm not a fan of Python dependency management, Bifrost is just a single executable that uses nearly no memory and is lightning fast.
For example, the image generation parameters of GPT-image-2 are largely ineffective.
Go is nice for the ten minutes you can use it until your hit your cap.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
If I was using the routing features it would make more sense - but they charge significantly more for that so the markup is really just for billing consolidation.
(yes, I know this article is about an oracle router)
Other people are allowed to call them on that.
Everyone wants the latest and greatest.
I am really eager to give Kimi K3 a try, but I’ll reserve my judgement until I’ve worked with it for at least a few days.
Glad to see centralized control fail on the grandest scale. Maybe we can learn a thing or two.
So what we are seeing is nothing more but geeks doing geeky stuff, the only one that has serious demonstrated that there are possibly be had is Anthropic and the Chinese labs are beginning to copying them in terms of user plans, coding tools, etc. They are giving away the model to show it's great. Once they have the compute to serve the world and they have a model just as good or better than top model, they will go close to keep all the profit.
They can afford to, assuming they distilled Fable, because that reduces their pre-training costs, doesn't it?
[1] https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412
There's no irony. The problem is these generalizations and labelling that's hurting everyone. It's the wrong way to view China and maybe many other places.
Just like the definition of AI, the definition of democratic or not evolved long ago.
1) it's substantially slower.
2) it's substantially more expensive.
3) it's code is considerably worse.
It's a joke when you consider what you get for what you pay for.
The future is good and better for everyone the more work is in the open and the more work is in the commercial space. It’s good all around.
The only way there is no benefit would be is if the open models are literal copies of the closed model, which unless there was direct theft, is highly improbable.
It's also true that Moonshot and other labs distill from Claude. This has been reported on extensively. I don't think there's any alpha for Anthropic distilling from this model. I do not mean to discount the tremendous amount of innovation regarding MoE and quantization that Moonshot has accomplished. But its training with synthetic data is in large part from distillation from frontier labs.
Making the process of creating the source code repeatable goes beyond the idea of open source. Open source is about being able to work with the code, not recreate it. It doesn't require domain experts to document every single thing they know. For example look at some of the GPU drivers in the Linux kernel. The GPU is not properly documented and there is trust that vendors are implementing things correctly.
I agree which is why I said you could make a similarly capable model.
> Open source is about being able to work with the code, not recreate it.
You can also use a hex editor to modify compiled binaries, but no one would consider that "open source".
It would be like if someone gave you a prompt you could pass into ChatGPT to produce the entire Linux kernel. While yes you could modify that prompt and then spend a ton of money on inference to generate millions of lines of code which hopefully are equivalent to the original Linux kernel it would be easier if you just had the source code to work with where you can make a simple extension. If you want to end a model you want the weights, and not the entire setup to generate it. The weights are the starting point that you can work off for training a new model similar to how the source code is the starting point people want to work off of.
Weights are not an output artifact no more than source code is. There is never a moment where you can claim that it's done. As requirements change new ways to change the weights / code come up. With different projects you might want to import the weights / code into a bigger model / codebase.
Kimi K3: $3/$15 (input/output)
Fable: $10/$50https://www.thestack.technology/hugging-face-hacked-turned-t...
So if the AI labs are literally running rogue models breaking into other organizations' servers, then yes, I am OK with those organizations self-hosting Chinese models for defensive use.
The issue is that models are not well-controlled and are increasingly powerful.
Offense/defense/Chinese/American/OAI/HuggingFace – none of it matters. What matters is introducing highly capable intelligences that we - quite demonstrably – do not have effective positive control over.
seems to suggest the author believes there's some intrinsic equilibrium
Which,
1) is definitely not proven and not guaranteed (open to proofs otherwise, not pithy sayings that have zero normative effect on reality)
2) is apparently "supported by" further evidence of lack of effective control, which does not feel like equilibrium whatsoever
Forget Iran, this place is what we’re going to wish we’d bombed.
Considering that of 89 terminal tasks there were 11 that only Kimi got right, and 7 only Fable - having a router gives significantly more consistent results if you define consistent to mean correct.
* Openrouter.ai for a hosted router
* https://github.com/diegosouzapw/OmniRoute for a local router
I’d be amenable to it but I’m already aware of them lying about token throughout by 50-100% on AA and on Twitter, even when you get a dedicated server.
Just too much lying piled up to extend courtesy here, even though you’re my favorite open model provider. Please, get your house in order, and if the house is so big that marketing drove this set, ask them to slow down a bit and market things that people can actually use / you actually provide.
Moonshot has committed to release it end of the month.
My only gripe was that it takes a very long time to think. It's a good model otherwise.
“State of [T]he Art” versus “State of [t]he Art”.
If not SotA then at least SOTA, which is more accurate.
In a world of so many acronyms, details matter.
I'm sure that more than once we've all had something we wrote which was intended to be obviously taken in a satirical or intentionally nonsensical manner taken seriously by someone else on the internet.
1) US export bans have made it so that Chinese companies have to compete using less-than-state-of-the-art hardware. This has forced Chinese companies to build more cost efficient models. Whereas, US companies have moreso tried to be state of the art by spending more money than anyone else on state-of-the-art hardware.
2) Xi Jinping has called for more open AI models (not to be confused with the closed models of OpenAI), and I'm happy to see a powerful world leader advocating for open-weight AI models. Whereas, the US seems likely to just ban models.
3) My impression is that, if China surpasses the US in AI development, there will basically be nothing that the US does better than the rest of the world--except for military spending--we spend a lot, but we don't necessarily spend well (something something Iran). I mean, if the US is no longer a tech leader in the world, like... what are we a leader at? Manufacturing? Healthcare? LOL. Are we a leader in any industry or by any metric? I wonder if China is attempting to remove the last jewel in the USA's crown with these AI releases.
4) It must be refreshing for companies to have access to a new model that isn't going to get pulled because the government bans it 2 days after release. And it's open-weight so it wont go away--amazing--what a shift in the market.
5) If it becomes clear that open-weight models are the future of AI, will that pop a huge bubble in the US economy? Maybe. But, on the other hand, these companies aren't just training AIs, they are also building data centers which will remain valuable no matter what happens.
This comment is stunningly out of touch. The US dominates finance (overwhelming lead in assets managed, stock market capitalization, trading volume, and basically every other metric); space launch (about 85% of all mass placed into orbit); medical devices (exports nearly 2x the second largest exporter); and pharmaceutical research (more active clinical trials than any other country, near-universally ranked as the top producer of major pharmaceutical innovations, world-leading survival rates on many cancer types). We are the world's leading producer of both oil and natural gas. We manufacture the world's most advanced jet engines, precision agricultural machinery, and measurement instruments. We design the world's most performant CPU's and GPU's. We film the most popular movies and record the most popular music. Despite having only 4% of the world's population, there is literally not a single major industry where the US is not a leading player.
There is no doubt that China is a serious threat to US global leadership, and they have already surpassed us in many areas. But that doesn't mean the US is behind overall. We still have a lot of strengths and we have every reason to hope for continued success in the 21st century.
> (exports nearly 2x the second largest exporter)
Can you provide the source? In the WTO's broader medical goods category, Germany actually exported slightly more than the US in 2022 ($202.6 billion versus $189.6 billion), so such a huge difference in a few years?
> and pharmaceutical research
China accounted for approximately 44.2% of the 104 new molecules in 2025, compared with 26.9% for the U.S. and 15.4% for Europe.
The 2024 shares were approximately 34.6% for China, 30.9% for the U.S., and 22.2% for Europe.
> there is literally not a single major industry where the US is not a leading player.
I will just give 3 examples: China completed roughly 91% of the world’s shipbuilding tonnage in 2025, holds more than 80% of solar module manufacturing capacity and produces more than three quarters of global batteries.
Sure, these are my sources. World Bank (2023): https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/yea... Observatory of Economic Complexity (2024): https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/medical-instruments
> China accounted for approximately 44.2% of the 104 new molecules in 2025, compared with 26.9% for the U.S. and 15.4% for Europe.
Source for this? My source was Citeline's 2026 annual review at https://pulseforinnovation.org/by-the-numbers-citelines-rd-a... which states:
> Findings from Citeline’s latest report, Pharma R&D Annual Review 2026, highlight the continued U.S. leadership in the life sciences ecosystem... The U.S. leads all other countries, currently advancing over 11,600 medicines – more than half of medicines in development worldwide.
> I will just give 3 examples
In general, I was referring to "major industries" in the sense of economic categories, as defined by (for example) the UN: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/seriesm/seriesm_4rev... Here shipbuilding is considered to be part of "manufacture of other transport equipment." I admit my wording was a bit imprecise; if you are going down to the level of specific products like ships or solar panels, clearly it will be easy to find examples of things that the US does not produce on any significant scale. Nevertheless, a few comments on your examples:
> China completed roughly 91% of the world’s shipbuilding tonnage in 2025
Source on this? 91% is a lot and I can't find anyone else making this claim. However I'll concede that the US is far behind China, South Korea, and Japan in shipbuilding.
> [China] holds more than 80% of solar module manufacturing capacity
You are correct that the US has "only" 60 GW of domestic solar module production capacity according to https://www.utilitydive.com/news/onshored-solar-supply-chain... However, as context - the only purpose of producing solar modules is to generate solar power, and the US was the 2nd-largest producer of solar power in 2025 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country Surely that makes us a leading player.
> [China] produces more than three quarters of global batteries
And the US was again the 2nd largest producer of battery cells, with an estimated capacity of 96 GWh in 2026. https://poweralliance.org/2026/03/18/american-energy-storage... Likewise in lithium-ion batteries: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-top-lithium...
People are paying for tokens, that will likely continue even if open weight wins.