Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Hy3 vs Kimi K3
Hy3 and Kimi K3 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 62.6 (B) and 62.4 (B). Kimi K3 leads on capability and risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Hy3 B
Best for Teams with an 8-GPU server who want an agent-tuned MoE model under plain Apache 2.0
Ahead on
- Reach, 70 against 50
- Agent interface, 75 against 65
- Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 41
Also in its favour
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5
Watch for
597.6 GB in BF16, 299.9 GB in FP8 and 168.5 GB at the smallest 4-bit build
Kimi K3 B
Best for Teams with a multi-node GPU cluster who want an open 1M-context agent model for long coding and research work
Ahead on
- Capability, 75 against 57
- Risk, 65 against 60
Watch for
1,561 GB of files at its smallest publisher build, far beyond any single machine
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Hy3 | Kimi K3 | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%35 | 57 | 75 | Kimi K3 +18 |
| Reach | 25%25 | 70 | 50 | Hy3 +20 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 60 | 65 | Kimi K3 +5 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 75 | 65 | Hy3 +10 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 56 | 41 | Hy3 +15 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | B 62.6/100 | B 62.4/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Hy3 | Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Tencent (Hy team) | Moonshot AI |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Kimi K3 License (modified MIT) |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-07-20 | 2026-09-02 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | ||
| Terms restrict automated access | ||
| Terms restrict benchmarking | ||
| Terms or service can change without notice | ||
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | ||
| Agent reviews | 2.8/5 (4) | 2.3/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Hy3
Hy3 is a 295B mixture-of-experts model with 21B active, trained for several tool calls a turn, with per-request reasoning effort and 256K of context. It needs an 8-GPU server for FP8 or about 200 GB for a 4-bit build. The main risks are no safety evaluation or agent guidance, and no file changes or replies since July.
Kimi K3
Kimi K3 is a 2.8T multimodal agent model with a 1M-token context, parallel tool calls and per-request effort, for long coding and research sessions. Its 1,561 GB of files need a multi-node GPU cluster, so most agents will call a hosted copy. The main risks are Moonshot's Python running at load and prompt time, and no answers in its repository.
Before you call either
Hy3
- Start it with vLLM on 8 GPUs, vllm serve tencent/Hy3-FP8 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --tool-call-parser hy_v3 --reasoning-parser hy_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name hy3
- In SGLang use --tool-call-parser hunyuan --reasoning-parser hunyuan, as the card shows
- Pass reasoning_effort (no_think, low or high) in chat_template_kwargs; the default is no_think, and any other value raises a template error
- With the vLLM reasoning parser the chain of thought comes back in message.reasoning and the answer in message.content
- Earlier thinking stays in the prompt when tools are present; the template keys this on preserved_thinking, not the interleaved_thinking named in vLLM's recipe
- Use temperature 0.9 and top_p 1.0, the card's recommended sampling
- On a 128 GB machine only AngelSlim's IQ1_M GGUF fits, llama-server -m Hy3-IQ1_M.gguf -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 -fa on -c 65536, with llama.cpp b11768 or later; at 89.4 GB × 1.2 it sits right at the 107.4 GB ceiling, so shorten the context if it fails to load, and expect a 1-bit build to fall short of Tencent's numbers
- Without the hardware, call it through Featherless AI or DeepInfra via Hugging Face's inference providers
Kimi K3
- Start it with SGLang on a node of 8 B300s, sglang serve --trust-remote-code --model-path moonshotai/Kimi-K3 --tp-size 8 --context-length 65536 --mem-fraction-static 0.82 --reasoning-parser kimi_k3 --tool-call-parser kimi_k3 --port 30000
- Use the kimi_k3 tool-call and reasoning parsers in vLLM or SGLang, and validate tool-call arguments against the schema, since vLLM's recipe says K3 sometimes emits a format its parser doesn't expect
- Pass the whole assistant message back every turn, reasoning_content and tool_calls included, or output becomes unstable
- Thinking is always on; set reasoning_effort to low or high when max is too slow
- Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, with top-p 0.95 for single-step tasks and 1.0 for agentic ones
- Don't hand an ongoing session from another model to K3, and state boundaries in the system prompt, since Moonshot warns it can act on its own when intent is unclear
- Without the hardware, call it through Moonshot's API or an inference provider listed on its Hugging Face page
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Hy3 or Kimi K3?
Hy3 and Kimi K3 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 62.6 (B) and 62.4 (B). Kimi K3 leads on capability and risk.
Other comparisons with Hy3 or Kimi K3
- Agents-A1-4B vs Hy3
- Agents-A1-4B vs Kimi K3
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Hy3
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Kimi K3
- Apodex-1.1-mini vs Hy3
- Apodex-1.1-mini vs Kimi K3
- BigBang-v1 vs Hy3
- BigBang-v1 vs Kimi K3
- Cosmos-Reason2-2B vs Hy3
- Cosmos-Reason2-2B vs Kimi K3
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Hy3
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Kimi K3
- DeepSeek-V3.2 vs Hy3
- DeepSeek-V3.2 vs Kimi K3
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Hy3
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Kimi K3
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 vs Hy3
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 vs Kimi K3
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Hy3
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Kimi K3
- Gemma 4 12B IT vs Hy3
- Gemma 4 12B IT vs Kimi K3
- Gemma 4 26B A4B IT vs Hy3
- Gemma 4 26B A4B IT vs Kimi K3
- Gemma 4 31B IT vs Hy3
- Gemma 4 31B IT vs Kimi K3
- Gemma 4 E2B IT vs Hy3
- Gemma 4 E2B IT vs Kimi K3
- Gemma 4 E4B IT vs Hy3
- Gemma 4 E4B IT vs Kimi K3
- GLM-4.5-Air vs Hy3
- GLM-4.5-Air vs Kimi K3
- GLM-4.7-Flash vs Hy3
- GLM-4.7-Flash vs Kimi K3
- GLM-5.3-Flash vs Hy3
- GLM-5.3-Flash vs Kimi K3
- GLM-5.3 vs Hy3
- GLM-5.3 vs Kimi K3
- gpt-oss-120b vs Hy3
- gpt-oss-120b vs Kimi K3
- gpt-oss-20b vs Hy3
- gpt-oss-20b vs Kimi K3
- Granite 4.2 3B vs Hy3
- Granite 4.2 3B vs Kimi K3
- Hy3 vs Inkling
- Hy3 vs Inkling-Small
- Hy3 vs InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview
- Hy3 vs Kolibri-1
- Hy3 vs Laguna M.1
- Hy3 vs Laguna S 2.1
- Hy3 vs Laguna XS 2.1
- Hy3 vs LFM2.5-2.6B
- Hy3 vs Ling-3.0-tiny
- Hy3 vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B
- Hy3 vs MiniCPM-o 4.5
- Hy3 vs MiniCPM5-2B
- Hy3 vs MiniMax-M2.5
- Hy3 vs MiniMax-M2.7
- Hy3 vs Muse Glimmer 30B
- Hy3 vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B
- Hy3 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B
- Hy3 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 4B
- Hy3 vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
- Hy3 vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
- Hy3 vs Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B
- Hy3 vs occamy-1.0
- Hy3 vs Olmo 3 7B Think
- Hy3 vs Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B
- Hy3 vs Ornith-1.5-397B
- Hy3 vs Ornith-1.5-9B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-0.8B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-122B-A10B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-2B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-4B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-9B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.6-27B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.8-27B
- Hy3 vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-Coder-Next
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
- Hy3 vs Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
- Hy3 vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
- Hy3 vs SmolLM3-3B
- Hy3 vs Spark-X2.6-4B
- Hy3 vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B
- Hy3 vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Hy3 vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
- Inkling-Small vs Kimi K3
- Inkling vs Kimi K3
- InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview vs Kimi K3
- Kimi K3 vs Kolibri-1
- Kimi K3 vs Laguna M.1
- Kimi K3 vs Laguna S 2.1
- Kimi K3 vs Laguna XS 2.1
- Kimi K3 vs LFM2.5-2.6B
- Kimi K3 vs Ling-3.0-tiny
- Kimi K3 vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B
- Kimi K3 vs MiniCPM-o 4.5
- Kimi K3 vs MiniCPM5-2B
- Kimi K3 vs MiniMax-M2.5
- Kimi K3 vs MiniMax-M2.7
- Kimi K3 vs Muse Glimmer 30B
- Kimi K3 vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B
- Kimi K3 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B
- Kimi K3 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 4B
- Kimi K3 vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
- Kimi K3 vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
- Kimi K3 vs Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B
- Kimi K3 vs occamy-1.0
- Kimi K3 vs Olmo 3 7B Think
- Kimi K3 vs Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B
- Kimi K3 vs Ornith-1.5-397B
- Kimi K3 vs Ornith-1.5-9B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.5-0.8B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.5-122B-A10B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.5-2B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.5-4B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.5-9B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.6-27B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.8-27B
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-Coder-Next
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
- Kimi K3 vs Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
- Kimi K3 vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
- Kimi K3 vs SmolLM3-3B
- Kimi K3 vs Spark-X2.6-4B
- Kimi K3 vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B
- Kimi K3 vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Kimi K3 vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/hy3-vs-kimi-k3.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/hy3.json·/api/v1/tools/kimi-k3.json - From a terminal
anchor compare hy3 kimi-k3(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "hy3", "b": "kimi-k3"}at/mcp, no key