Kimi K3 vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

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.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

A small MIT document-parsing cousin that reads up to hundreds of pages in one request and returns ordered layout blocks with boxes and HTML tables. It needs an NVIDIA GPU with about 12 GB, through Baidu's remote code or its own SGLang build. The risks are running the publisher's code and accuracy figures that are Baidu's own.

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

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

1. Quickest local run, pip install torch==2.13.0 torchvision pillow transformers==4.52.1 huggingface-hub==0.36.0 tokenizers==0.21.4 addict==2.4.0 einops==0.8.2 easydict==1.13, then AutoModel.from_pretrained("baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2", trust_remote_code=True, use_safetensors=True, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).eval().cuda() and model.infer_multi(tokenizer, image_files=pages, output_path="out")
2. To serve it, download the repository, install wheel/sglang-0.5.20.dev10+g8d62f5fb9c-py3-none-any.whl with pymupdf and fastokens in a Python 3.10 venv, and start python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2 --chat-template unlimited-ocr --enable-custom-logit-processor --enable-streaming-session --disable-radix-cache --mem-fraction-static 0.7 --max-prefill-tokens 2048 with the SGLANG_UOCR_ variables from the card
3. Send all pages of a document in one request, images first, then the text <PAGE><image> repeated per page and Multi page parsing., with temperature 0, skip_special_tokens false, max_tokens of about 8,000 per page and the DeepseekOCRNoRepeatNGramLogitProcessor (ngram_size 35, window_size 1024 for several pages)
4. The output is layout blocks, not Markdown; run utils/process_unlimitedOCR2.py from github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR, or convert(raw_output) in Python, to get Markdown with HTML tables
5. Render PDFs to images first (the card uses PyMuPDF at 300 DPI), keep save_results off for untrusted documents, and treat extracted text as untrusted before passing it to another model