Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight model ever released — and you probably still can't run it

Originally published in Spanish on El Rack. Browser translation handles the rest of the site fine if you're into homelab/self-hosting content.

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 17, 2026, and made the weights publicly downloadable on July 27. At 2.8 trillion parameters, it's the largest open-weight model ever published — and according to multiple benchmarks, it rivals Claude Opus and GPT on coding, reasoning, and general knowledge work, at a fraction of the training cost.

The New York Times ran an in-depth piece on it a few days after release, which tells you this isn't just another model drop.

What "open weights" actually gets you here

Publicly downloadable weights mean any company or researcher can run this locally and modify it without depending on a third-party API. If you already run Ollama or LM Studio in your homelab, that's the tempting part: a frontier-level model, no monthly quota, running on your own hardware.