Kimi K3 vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

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.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

A 9B cousin tuned on MiMo-V2.6's agent work for coding, terminal tasks and visual coding, released as a base for RL research. It needs about 23 GB in BF16, since Xiaomi ships no smaller build. The main risks are no safety results while a seventh of its tuning is offensive security, and nobody at Xiaomi answering reports.

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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

1. Serve it as the card does, sglang serve --model-path XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B --reasoning-parser mimo, and add --tool-call-parser mimo for parsed tool calls
2. SGLang's mimo reasoning parser expects thinking to be asked for, so pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true, as the card does, and read reasoning_content
3. Calls come back as function and parameter blocks inside tool_call, the same shape vLLM's and SGLang's qwen3_coder parsers read
4. The generation config samples at temperature 0.6, top_k 20 and top_p 0.95
5. Images and video go in through Qwen3.5's processor; the template's audio tokens have no audio encoder behind them
6. The MTP head isn't in the files, so skip MTP speculative decoding even though config.json lists a layer
7. It's an SFT checkpoint meant for further RL, and discussions report runaway generation on llama.cpp, so cap max_tokens