Comment by airstrike

> I’m asking because i keep hearing that open weight models are cheap and efficient - is that really the case in practice?

I think that's the case for people who compare it to proprietary models paid via API—which I think is irrelevant given the majority of people daily driving AI coding are doing on a subscription plan.

The better analysis then is not about AI coding, since there's no subscription plan for Kimi K3.

Instead, compare the cost of running some agentic _task_ that isn't coding which can only be done via API. Think of all the startups wrapping around ChatGPT and Claude to provide some additional set of tools, context, data and hoping to turn it into a profitable service.

To those companies, which are many, open models are the difference between the math working out today vs. praygeing they can scale fast enough to find profitability.