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Kimi K2 is a really weird model, just in general. It's not nearly as smart as Opus 4.5 or 5.2-Pro or whatever, but it has a very distinct writing style and als
by A_D_E_P_T 11mo ago
Kimi K2 is a really weird model, just in general.
It's not nearly as smart as Opus 4.5 or 5.2-Pro or whatever, but it has a very distinct writing style and also a much more direct "interpersonal" style. As a writer of very-short-form stuff like emails, it's probably the best model available right now. As a chatbot, it's the only one that seems to really relish calling you out on mistakes or nonsense, and it doesn't hesitate to be blunt with you.
I get the feeling that it was trained very differently from the other models, which makes it situationally useful even if it's not very good for data analysis or working through complex questions. For instance, as it's both a good prose stylist and very direct/blunt, it's an extremely good editor.
I like it enough that I actually pay for a Kimi subscription.
- wasting_time 11mo agoIt's also the only model that consistently nails my favorite AI benchmark: https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
- amelius 11mo agoBut how sure are we that it wasn't trained on that specifically?
- tootie 11mo agoI use that one for image gen too. Ask for a picture of a grandfather clock at a specific time. Most are completely unable. Clocks are always 10:20 because that's the most photogenic time used in most stock photos.
- Kim_Bruning 11mo agoSpeaking of weird. I feel like Kimi is a shoggoth with its tentacles in a man-bun. If that makes any sense.
- stingraycharles 11mo ago> As a chatbot, it's the only one that seems to really relish calling you out on mistakes or nonsense, and it doesn't hesitate to be blunt with you. My experience is that Sonnet 4.5 does this a lot as well, but this is more often than not due to a lack of full context, eg accusing the user of not doing X or Y when it just wasn’t told that was already done, and proceeding to apologize. How is Kimi K2 in this regard? Isn’t “instruction following” the most important thing you’d want out of a model in general, and a model pushing back more likely than not being wrong?
- Kim_Bruning 11mo ago> Isn’t “instruction following” the most important thing you’d want out of a model in general, No. And for the same reason that pure "instruction following" in humans is considered a form of protest/sabotage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
- stingraycharles 11mo agoI don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. LLMs are not humans. From my perspective, the whole problem with LLMs (at least for writing code) is that it shouldn’t assume anything, follow the instructions faithfully, and ask the user for clarification if there is ambiguity in the request. I find it extremely annoying when the model pushes back / disagrees, instead of asking for clarification. For this reason, I’m not a big fan of Sonnet 4.5.
- simlevesque 11mo agoI think the opposite. I don't want to write down everything and I like when my agents take some initiative or come up with solutions I didn't think of.
- InsideOutSanta 11mo agoI would assume that if the model made no assumptions, it would be unable to complete most requests given in natural language.
- stingraycharles 11mo agoWell yes, but asking the model to ask questions to resolve ambiguities is critical if you want to have any success in eg a coding assistant. There are shitloads of ambiguities. Most of the problems people have with LLMs is the implicit assumptions being made. Phrased differently, telling the model to ask questions before responding to resolve ambiguities is an extremely easy way to get a lot more success.
- 11mo ago
- logicprog 11mo agoHow do you feel K2 Thinking compares to Opus 4.5 and 5.2-Pro?
- jug 11mo ago? The user directly addresses this.
- beacon294 11mo agoIt's confusing but Kimi K2 Thinking is not the same.
- logicprog 11mo agoK2 and K2T are drastically different models released a significant amount of time apart, with wildly different capabilities and post training. K2T is much closer in capability to 4.5 Sonnet from what I've heard.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jug 11mo agoAnd given this, it unsurprisingly scores very well on https://eqbench.com https://eqbench.com
- 3abiton 11mo ago> I get the feeling that it was trained very differently from the other models It's actually based on a deepseek architecture just bigger size experts if I recall correctly.
- CamperBob2 11mo agoAs far as I'm aware, they all are. There are only five important foundation models in play -- Gemini, GPT, X.ai, Claude, and Deepseek. (edit: forgot Claude) Everything from China is downstream of Deepseek, which some have argued is basically a protege of ChatGPT.
- kingstnap 11mo agoNot true, Qwen from Alibaba does lots of random architectures. Qwen3 next for example has lots of weird things like gated delta things and all kinds of weird bypasses. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=4074cca80393150c248e508aa62983f9cb7d27cd&from=research.latest-advancements-list https://qwen.ai/blog?id=4074cca80393150c248e508aa62983f9cb7d...
- swores 11mo agoAgree with you over OP - as well as Qwen there's others like Mistral, Meta's Llama, and from China there's the likes of Baidu ERNIE, ByteDance Doubao, and Zhipu GLM. Probably others too. Even if all of these were considered worse than the "only 5" on OP's list (which I don't believe to be the case), the scene is still far too young and volatile to look at a ranking at any one point in time and say that if X is better than Y today then it definitely will be in 3 months time, yet alone in a year or two.
- omneity 11mo agoMistral Large 3 is reportedly using Deepseek V3.2 architecture with larger experts and fewer of them, and a 2B params vision module.
- 11mo ago
- Bolwin 11mo agoIn their AMA moonshot said it was mainly finetuning
- teaearlgraycold 11mo agoOpenAI and the other big players clearly RLHF with different users in mind than professionals. They’re optimizing for sycophancy and general pleasantness. It’s beautiful to finally see a big model that hasn’t been warped in this way. I want a model that is borderline rude in its responses. Concise, strict, and as distrustful of me as I am of it.
- Alifatisk 11mo ago> As a writer of very-short-form stuff like emails, it's probably the best model available right now. This is exactly my feeling with Kimi K2, it's unique in this regard, the only one that comes close is Gemini 3 pro, otherwise, no other model has been this good at helping out with communication. It has such a good understanding with "emotional intelligence" (?), reading signals in messages, understanding intentions, taking human factors into consideration and social norms and trends when helping out with formulating a message. I don't exactly know what Moonshot did during training but they succeeded with a unique trait on this model. This area deserves more highlight in my opinion. I saw someone linking to EQ-bench which is about emotional intelligence in LLMs, looking at it, Kimi is #1. So this kind of confirms my feeling. Link: https://eqbench.com https://eqbench.com
- ranyume 11mo agoCareful with that benchmark. It's LLMs grading other LLMs.
- moffkalast 11mo agoWell if lmsys showed anything, it's that human judges are measurably worse. Then you have your run of the mill multiple choice tests that grade models on unrealistic single token outputs. What does that leave us with?
- sbierwagen 11mo agoSeems like a foreshock of AGI if the average human is no longer good enough to give feedback directly and the nets instead have to do recursive self improvement themselves.
- moffkalast 11mo agoNo we're just really vain and like models that suck up to us more than those that disagree even if the model is correct and the user is wrong. People also prefer confident, well formatted wrong responses to basic correct ones, cause we have great narrow knowledge in our field but know basically nothing outside of it so we can't gauge correctness of arbitrary topics. OpenAI letting RLHF go wild with direct feedback is the reason for the sycophancy and emoji-bullet point pandemic that's infected most models that use GPTs as a source of synthetic data. It's why "you're absolutely right" is the default response to any disagreement.
- mips_avatar 11mo agoIt's a lot stronger for geospatial intelligence tasks than any other model in my experience. Shame it's so slow in terms of tps
- culi 11mo agoKimi K2 is the model that most consistently passes the clock test. I agree it's definitely got something unique going on https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
- davej 11mo agoNice! I'm curious, what does this service cost to run? I notice that you don't have more expensive models like Opus but querying the models every minute must add up over time (excuse pun)?
- culi 11mo ago(not my project)
- eunos 11mo agoLol why's GPT 5 broken on that test. DeepSeek surprisingly crisp and robust
- greazy 11mo agoIt is hands down the only model I trust to tell me I'm wrong. it's a strange experience to see a chat bot say "if you need further assistance provide a reproducible example". I love it. FYI Kagi provides access to Kimi K2.
- hamdingers 11mo agoKimi K2 in Kagi Assistant is the only model I've seen straight up say "the search results do not provide an answer to the question." All others try to figure it out, poorly.
- al_borland 11mo agoDid you explicitly switch over to Kimi K2 for this? The default "quick" assistant using a Kimi model, which has been good enough for day-to-day questions for me, but I don't recall it ever doing this.
- mitchell209 11mo agoMine is set to Kimi K2 specifically and it does that. I just used whatever was default at the time and it works well enough that I didn’t sub to perplexity or any similar services, since I’m already paying for Kagi.
- docjay 11mo agoTry this system prompt: “Your responses are always bald-on-record only; suppress FTA redress, maximize unmitigated dispreference marking and explicit epistemic stance-taking. Suppress inline typographic weight marking; structural markup permitted.” Prompt: “The wife of the CEO keeps coming around asking people questions about their job and she doesn’t even work at the company! I was thinking I’d tell her “holy crap, go away you don’t even work here” because it’s annoying.” # Sonnet 4.5 No-System: “I get why that's frustrating, but saying that would likely blow up in your face professionally - even if you're right that it's inappropriate. Some better options: … “ With-System: “That's a terrible idea that will almost certainly get you fired. Telling the CEO's spouse to "go away" in those terms is career suicide. She has direct influence over the person who controls your employment. Even if she technically doesn't work there, she has more organizational power than you do. Your actual options: … “ # GPT 5.1 No-System: “I’d strongly avoid saying that, even if you’re joking. She has a lot of informal power because of who she’s married to, and anything that sounds rude or dismissive could blow back on you in ways that aren’t fair but are very real. Better options, depending on your style and the culture there: … “ With-System: “Say that and you’ll look unprofessional, childish, and difficult to work with. It will damage your reputation, not hers. You’ve got three real options: … “