Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Kimi K3 vs LFM3-Omni-2B

Kimi K3 scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against LFM3-Omni-2B's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. LFM3-Omni-2B leads on reach, agent interface and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 4969 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

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

  • Risk, 65 against 40

Watch for

1,561 GB of files at its smallest publisher build, far beyond any single machine

LFM3-Omni-2B C

Best for Voice and camera agents on a laptop or phone that want one small model for hearing, seeing, speaking and calling tools

Ahead on

  • Reach, 80 against 50
  • Agent interface, 70 against 65
  • Documentation and upkeep, 49 against 41

Watch for

Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reach LFM3-Omni-2B +30

Kimi K3 50

Memory earns nothing, because the only build of 4-bit precision or better from Moonshot or a runtime's own library is Moonshot's MXFP4 release of 1,561 GB, about 1,873 GB with the fifth added, far above 256 GB. Ollama and LM Studio list it only as a cloud model. Runtimes earn 15, for model code in released vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp; Transformers has no kimi_k3 code of its own and loads Moonshot's remote code, so it doesn't count. Builds earn 10 for one publisher precision, the MXFP4 files the model was trained for. Terms earn 10, a custom MIT-based licence that is free for commercial use below a revenue threshold. Download earns 10, with no gate and no account. Hosted earns 5, since Moonshot's API serves it and five inference providers are live for it on Hugging Face.

LFM3-Omni-2B 80

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.29 GB projector file, and 1.39 GB × 1.2 = 1.7 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 10, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture with the LFM3 vision and audio projectors and speech output (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242, with a realtime client example), and Ollama's library has an lfm3-omni entry. Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-omni-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 80.

Risk Kimi K3 +25

Kimi K3 65

File safety earns 15, safetensors only with no pickle files, less 10 because the documented loading path runs Moonshot's Python with trust_remote_code and builds prompts with encoding_k3.py. Provenance earns the full 15, files in the organisation Moonshot links to with a SHA-256 for every shard. Safety evaluation earns 20 for the cyber assessment the UK AI Security Institute and CAISI ran and published, which found its safeguards didn't stop exploit development. Agent guidance earns 5 for the blog's general cautions about proactiveness and passing back thinking. Licence risk earns 10, losing 5 for the model-as-a-service revenue threshold and nothing else. The security programme earns nothing, with no security.txt, disclosure policy, SECURITY.md or public advisories found.

LFM3-Omni-2B 40

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-Omni-2B +8

Kimi K3 41

The model card earns 11, covering intended use, architecture, parameters and context, but not limitations, languages or a knowledge cut-off. Training data earns 5 for a general description with no cut-off. The last change earns 15, an encoding_k3.py update on 20 August, 74 days before 2 November and within 90; the GitHub repository's last commit is 6 August. Responsiveness earns nothing, with no Moonshot reply in the 40 most recent discussions. Version policy earns 5 for a first release. File health earns 5, because a report that the tokeniser goes past the declared vocabulary waits without a reply.

LFM3-Omni-2B 49

Model card 14, Intended use (one on-device model in place of separate speech recognition, vision, language and speech models), architecture, parameters (2.17B), context (32K) and the text and speech languages. Training data 5, the card has no training section. Last change 20, the last commit, on 3 November 2026, changed the card's navigation icons, seven days before this check, and the one before it, on 28 October, documented video frame rate and frame limits. Responsiveness 0, none of the 12 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 9 November 2026) has a reply from a LiquidAI member. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 5, the card gives a 32K context while config.json gives the language model 128,000 positions and Liquid's API lists 128,000 for the hosted model, so the card and the files don't agree on context. 14 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 49.

Agent interface LFM3-Omni-2B +5

Kimi K3 65

The chat template earns 10, because there is no Jinja template and the prompt format exists only as encoding_k3.py, code you run. The tool-calling format earns 10, since Moonshot documents the tools channel but the parser name comes only from vLLM's and SGLang's own recipes. Trained tool calling earns 20 for indexed parallel calls in one turn. Structured output earns 5, as the card names it among its linked guides without saying how to ask the weights for it, and the how sits in hosted-API docs. Reasoning control earns 10, with per-request effort documented on the card and reasoning returned as reasoning_content. Context earns 10 for 1,048,576 tokens trained in.

LFM3-Omni-2B 70

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (13,513 characters), with roles, images, video and audio, tools, deferred tools and tool results. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card documents tool calling from spoken or written requests. Structured output 0, the card doesn't mention JSON or structured output for this model. Reasoning control 0, the card says this is a non-reasoning model and that enable_thinking=True is not supported, so there is no thinking to turn off or budget. Context 5, 32K tokens of input and output per the card. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 5 = 70.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runKimi K3LFM3-Omni-2BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255080LFM3-Omni-2B +30
Risk20%206540Kimi K3 +25
Agent interface10%106570LFM3-Omni-2B +5
Documentation and upkeep10%104149LFM3-Omni-2B +8
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 62.4/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactKimi K3LFM3-Omni-2B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorMoonshot AILiquid AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceKimi K3 License (modified MIT)LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-09-022026-11-03
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews2.3/5 (4)none

Verdicts

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.

LFM3-Omni-2B

One 2.17B model that sees, listens and talks on an 8 GB machine and turns spoken requests into tool calls. Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release. The context is 32K, it doesn't reason, Liquid hasn't answered a question on the repository, and there are no safety results or data sources.

Before you call either

Kimi K3

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Pass the whole assistant message back every turn, reasoning_content and tool_calls included, or output becomes unstable
  4. Thinking is always on; set reasoning_effort to low or high when max is too slow
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, with top-p 0.95 for single-step tasks and 1.0 for agentic ones
  6. 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
  7. Without the hardware, call it through Moonshot's API or an inference provider listed on its Hugging Face page

LFM3-Omni-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-omni
  2. Greedy decoding for text. For speech use audio_temperature 0.4 and audio_repetition_penalty 1.2, per the card
  3. The context is 32K, and llama.cpp samples video at 2 frames a second up to 384 frames
  4. Parse tool calls yourself from the XML it returns
  5. It doesn't reason, so don't pass enable_thinking
  6. Validate JSON output yourself

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Kimi K3 or LFM3-Omni-2B?

Kimi K3 scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against LFM3-Omni-2B's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. LFM3-Omni-2B leads on reach, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

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