[lukan]

Since Claude is the first time for me really, really out (TIL against my wished about https://status.claude.com/), I am now interested enough to see what else works. But ... when I click pricing, I see "Join a waitlist". Wtf? Are they really that good, so were totally surprised and overwhelmed by the requests, is this a marketing stunt, or do they just don't have the hardware being in china?

[KronisLV]

> Are they really that good,

They did exceed the expecations of pretty much everyone! I've also blogged about using the model, it's a bit on the slow side but pretty good!

> so were totally surprised and overwhelmed by the requests ... or do they just don't have the hardware being in china?

Yes, this is mostly the case: https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2078855608565207130

As a user, I much prefer that to service disruptions or severely degraded or secretly quantized performance. However if I didn't have an account, I'd be pretty pissed off about not being able to give them money and become a user.

[lukan]

"I'd be pretty pissed off about not being able to give them money and become a user."

I am now rather pretty pissed towards antrophic for stopping my flow and forcing me to search for alternatives.

[Alifatisk]

No, the waiting list is true.

Kimi had become that popular. I was a subscriber of Kimi back when latest version was Kimi K2. Later I unsubscribed because I jumped over to GLM subscription (they had amazing deal). Now when I wanted to try out Kimi K3 to find out what the fuzz was all about, I couldn’t subscribe to them.

I remember reading a post from Moonshot team about this, they are doing this because they are almost at peak capacity and want to reserve it to keep the quality for their current customers.

We are actually witnessing an open-weight model catching up at catching mainstream users attention. And instead of behaving like Anthropic, they actually care about their users experience.

[therein]

I wish I could get a Kimi subscription. I'd jump away from Anthropic in a heartbeat.

When they first announced, I created an account but didn't subscribe, so I am stuck on a waitlist now.

[jfrbfbreudh]

I wonder what the criteria is, I signed up for the $19 / month waitlist today and got my invite within a few hours.

[therein]

Maybe you signed up with a phone number? Mine was a Google login.

[MYEUHD]

Since the model is open-weights, you can get from other providers, for example see https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#providers

[Alifatisk]

The only downside with third party providers is that you have to trust that the provider have setup and configured it correctly, and is not secretly quantizing it.

See Kimi Vendor Verifier.

[usef-]

Plenty of providers on that list aren't fly-by-nights and have easily proven themselves in past models. Jeremy Howard does demos on Fireworks.

A nice thing about open router is you can specify filters, like "US hosting without data retention"

[applicative]

Yes, something I read just before it was released suggested that, because of the unique features of the model, there was a back and forth of Hugging Face, Moonshot and providers like Together AI and Fireworks AI. This also explained why it took much less than a day for Together, Fireworks etc to appear. Whatever they are doing is what Moonshot wants, I think.

[jadbox]

Do any support the smaller context for better pricing?

[HDBaseT]

Not at all a marketing gimmick, the demand is simply that high.

I was able to press "Join waitlist" and then within 48 hours got accepted. The limits aren't very high, no where near the endless subsided+resets given on ChatGPT/Claude. I recommend ChatGPT for good value output!

Others here mentioned "the providers could be quantizing it!" but some of the providers on OpenRouter have partnered with Moonshoot and OpenRouter shows the int when you expand on the provider.

It should say "mxfp4" but providers like Baseten report FP8.

[InsideOutSanta]

It's an extremely popular model hosted by a company affected by hardware export bans. I doubt they'd voluntarily prevent people from subscribing if they didn't absolutely have to to maintain service quality.

[zorked]

I have been using Kimi for months. It did get superslow after the K3 launch, then they blocked signups and normalized the service.

It's not ideal that people can't join but as a user I am happy that they focused on serving existing customers.

[0xc0c0c0]

I honestly prefer this as opposed to what Anthropic has done in the past which is to continue accepting users even if they don't have the capacity to serve and behind the scenes tone down everyone's limits.