Kimi vs. Koala

Overview

Kimi is Moonshot AI's open-weight family for long-context reasoning, coding, multimodal agents, and research. Kimi K3 is the current generation.

Moonshot AI launched Kimi in 2023 with an early focus on long-context document understanding. Kimi K3, released in July 2026, is a 2.8T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 104B active parameters. It combines native vision, a one-million-token context window, long-horizon coding, knowledge work, reasoning, and agent orchestration. The full model weights are available under the Kimi K3 License.

Initial release: 2023-10-09

Current generation: Kimi K3

Reference

https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3

Further Reading

• https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2
• https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3
• https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3

Overview

Released alongside Vicuna, Koala is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the web. On the developers' benchmarks, Koala outperforms its sibling Alpaca, though its adoption has been significantly less than that of its other sibling, Vicuna. Due to its use of LLaMA, only research use is permitted.

Initial release: 2023-04-03

Reference

https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2023/04/03/koala/

Further Reading