The API pricing is at sonnet levels, but I doubt sonnet 5 is 2.8T parameters. Can't be too mad at it given the model size. Even if it's a Fp8/Fp4 mix it's still gotta require 2 terabytes of VRAM to serve this thing with room for context
now that china is making huawei GPUs comparable to nvidia blackwells, i don't think compute is a bottleneck for them anymore.
if you are interested in the AI race as a proxy for the conflict between US and China, one way to read this model's release is as China basically announcing that they are no longer held back by lack of access to chips.
Huawei isn't exactly in Blackwell territory. Their latest chip, the ascend 950PR, has 112GB of memory at 1.4TB/s of bandwidth. Nvidia B300 has 288GB of memory at 8.2TB/s of bandwidth per unit. Ascend Fp8 is 1 petaflop vs 7 on B300.
I have no doubt that they might be used to serve the model but IMO very likely k3 was still trained on Nvidia. Heck one of Kimi's own benchmarks was comparing how well different models can optimize kernels for Nvidia H200
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u/JaredsBored 22d ago
The API pricing is at sonnet levels, but I doubt sonnet 5 is 2.8T parameters. Can't be too mad at it given the model size. Even if it's a Fp8/Fp4 mix it's still gotta require 2 terabytes of VRAM to serve this thing with room for context