Kimi K3 Now Available via Telnyx Inference API

(telnyx.com)

123 points | by fionaattelnyx 16 hours ago

23 comments

  • apexalpha 3 hours ago
    Is this an ad?

    Why is this provider specifically on the front page?

    Also why is this not available over openrouter?

    • heisgone 2 hours ago
      I don't mind it as long as the company engage in the comments. They haven't so far.
    • ljlolel 34 minutes ago
      This (Telnyx) is available on TrustedRouter.com
    • dan_gee 3 hours ago
      [dead]
    • accountforih 2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • Mossy9 8 hours ago
    Also available from Nebius, via Cortecs: https://cortecs.ai/detailedServerlessView/kimi-k3

    €2.693/M input €13.464/M output Surprisingly, cache is not mentioned

    Upd: Tensorix joined the fray, with the same prices, with cache at €0.673/M read

  • theredsix 12 hours ago
    10% cheaper than official! Let the inference pricing wars begin!
    • norbert515 5 hours ago
      I'm really curious how far and how fast prices will drop (if at all)!
  • mesmertech 4 hours ago
    Why are you guys not on Openrouter? I assume you'd get way more volume that way no?

    Or does openrouter have like a specific contract you have to sign with them and requirements or smth? https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#providers

    • ljlolel 34 minutes ago
      This (Telnyx) is available on TrustedRouter.com
      • addandsubtract 24 minutes ago
        Soon, we're gonna need a router for all the different routers.
    • hmokiguess 3 hours ago
      Who is "you guys"? Telnyx?
      • DaSHacka 2 hours ago
        Well, the OP's username is "Fiona at Telnyx"
        • hmokiguess 2 hours ago
          I kinda realized my question was dumb afterwards, I think I misread the question lol thanks
  • hmokiguess 3 hours ago
    Is it also offered via a ZDR + BAA / HIPAA eligible? Would love to use it in prod
  • htrp 2 hours ago
    Token Type Price per 1M tokens Cached Input $0.27 Input $2.70 Output $13.50

    Looks like they are first vendor to undercut in price.

  • zius 7 hours ago
    In my first interaction ("hi there kimi k3!"), Kimi K3 identified twice out of three times as Claude:

    > Hi there! Quick note — I'm actually Claude, made by Anthropic, not Kimi. But no worries!

    https://imgur.com/a/jqpc2Jc

    and

    > Just a quick heads-up — I'm Claude, made by Anthropic, not Kimi! Kimi is a different AI assistant (made by Moonshot AI), so it looks like there might be a little mix-up.

    https://imgur.com/a/AKxeysH

    • tomashubelbauer 6 hours ago
      FWIW Claude sometimes identifies as DeepSeek when asked in Chinese: https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101
    • victorbjorklund 5 hours ago
      I remember when Claude identified as ChatGPT a long time ago. It proves nothing else than that there is a lot of training material on the internet with Claude as the AI.
      • scotty79 2 hours ago
        I don't understand why labs don't include correct model name in the training process. Almost nobody seems to be willing to tell their models who they actually are.
        • embedding-shape 2 hours ago
          If the model works correctly, you don't need to include the model name in the training process. You just add in the system prompt "You are X, trained by Y" and the model will claim to be that. That also allows users to "white-label" the outputs sort to say.

          This approach is basically how all "models know who they are" (they don't actually typically "know" that at all), it's just a system prompt instruction in the platform you use.

          • brookst 2 hours ago
            But I would expect they would at least use post-training to discourage identifying as the wrong company.
            • XenophileJKO 1 hour ago
              That only makes sense if you don't sell access to the model for 3rd party product development. One of those products is chat personas/agents. The company integrating the model will want it's own identity.
          • scotty79 2 hours ago
            You can put anything in the prompt. And if you have bare model that you don't give any prompt from the start and want to find out which model you are talking to, you are out of luck.

            I think Qwen teaches its models that they are Qwen. Most others don't bother.

        • irthomasthomas 1 hour ago
          Because they do not know the name of the model before they train it. There is also distillation, where multiple models will be trained from a larger one. E.G. Sonnet was promoted to Opus at one point after it surpassed expectations.
    • cleaning 6 hours ago
      How many times do people need to point out that every model has this behavior until this stops being posted?
    • nojs 6 hours ago
      This happens with other models too - Gemini often identifies as ChatGPT for me, confusing many a debugging attempt
      • Razengan 3 hours ago
        It's distillations all the way down!
    • w4yai 1 hour ago
      Models don't know who they are. Stop asking this question to the model as a source of truth.
    • Razengan 3 hours ago
      The meme/trope of China copying everything really keeps playing into itself
    • FooBarWidget 6 hours ago
      Models don't have an inherent identity. It should be obvious by now that every models trains on public AI chat session transcripts. I've seen Claude say it's Qwen.
    • croes 4 hours ago
      Could be on purpose to disguise as a US made model
    • TZubiri 6 hours ago
      Bootleg AI
      • victorbjorklund 5 hours ago
        • croes 4 hours ago
          That’s how a smoking gone turns into a water pistol
      • lukewarm707 3 hours ago
        when open source models are banned maybe i will become a cartel kingpin smuggling open source weights into the usa. find a sufficiently shifty street corner, 'what do you need', "kimi". are you familiar with my product? pure mxfp4, $500 per TB.

        (joke and walter mitty, i know the government reads my messages)

      • Grimblewald 6 hours ago
        if this qualifies bootleg, point me at non-bootleg frontier ai.
  • morpheuskafka 3 hours ago
    I have used Telnyx for, on the opposite end of cool-ness, their fax API. Curious if their AI pricing and quality are actually competitive or if this is just a rapid pivot to try to ride the AI wave.
    • trollbridge 1 minute ago
      By 2030 or so, it will become clear that AI's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
  • bedros 7 hours ago
    any of these providers are HIPAA compliant?
    • vdfs 4 hours ago
      Amazon Bedrock, but they don't have this model yet
  • maelito 7 hours ago
    Where is it hosted ?
  • smallerize 16 hours ago
    Very cool. What are your throughput and latency like?
  • madhu_ghalame 7 hours ago
    Consider publishing latency, throughput, and cost metrics under different workloads to help teams make informed decisions.
  • tokai 3 hours ago
    That is not going to be cheap for long if K3 prices does the same as GLM5.2 prices. If nothing else open weight models are great to get providers to compeete on price.
  • rvz 7 hours ago
    Jevon's paradox depends on how cheap the tokens get as the price of tokens get driven to zero as intelligence gets better and cheaper.
    • inigyou 5 hours ago
      Well this is a very large and expensive model. Try something like Qwen-7B if you want ultra-cheap.
      • philjohn 1 hour ago
        I thought Mythos was rumored to be around 10tn parameters? Kimi k3 is 2.8tn.
      • neuroticnews25 4 hours ago
        Larger than Mythos? How is that?
  • jakswa 13 hours ago
    what quantization? FP4?
    • NitpickLawyer 10 hours ago
      The model is native mxfp4 w/ mxfp8 activations via QAT.
      • trollbridge 0 minutes ago
        I have some morbid curiousity about what K3 would be like in an FP16 or FP32 model.
  • TZubiri 7 hours ago
    I think telnyx is a good product, with the only stain to its name being the supply chain attack on their python library.

    But I don't feel like providing inference is a professional move, it feels like out of scope for a telephony IaaS company. Feels like a FOMO moment where a reputation of years is crashed in a couple of weekends of being drawn into a fad.

    And the fact that it's a chinese model doesn't quite help? I guess it's on brand with the 'cheap' pay as you go brand telnyx might already be associated to.

    But more so it reads like Telnyx is trying to 'jump' into the trend of the 'open weights' discussion to compete with closed source incumbents. But we are at the tail end of the boom, anti ai sentiment is ever growing, customers now despise AI, especially in support channels, which is presumably the hook that Telnyx would have into 'AI'(LLMs). At this stage any company or individual that tries to join into the buzzword fueled cycle will pay the full fixed cost reputational price, but only reap the leftover hay from when the sun shone.

    AI(LLM) on support channels is essentially a decapitalization of a company/brand, the company has a reputation that customers value, and might be worth good money in the market, and by implementing AI (LLMs) on support, a lot of costs can be cut, while the brand loses value, not sustainable. And by Telnyx (or any B2B company)asking their clients to participate in this decapitalization move, they essentially gamble their reputation as well, albeit with better odds as shovel sellers.

    • jbstack 6 hours ago
      Large profitable corporations with very poor customer support have existed long before AI, so why should it be different? Using AI to provide poor customer service is just an implementation detail.
    • inigyou 5 hours ago
      Companies changing their scope or opening side products is not at all unusual. Microsoft is Windows, what's this Xbox thing? Google is search, why do they have email? Y Combinator is a startup accelerator, why'd they make their own Reddit?
  • LoganDark 13 hours ago
    Telnyx was cool until they started demanding KYC. I would use them for burner phone numbers until they started saying they needed my government ID. Fuck that.

    OVH same thing. Tried to buy a VPS from them some years back and they said no VPS unless I provided ID. Would not refund me. Tried to dispute but my bank just gave me a credit instead.

    • illliillll 8 hours ago
      You can go on telegram and pay someone $10 to do the KYC for you.
    • nujabe 10 hours ago
      There were new regulations passed to combat robocalls that forced these companies to tighten up.
      • oxidant 6 hours ago
        10DLC in North America
    • TZubiri 7 hours ago
      Seems like a good riddance, telnyx is for business usecases, not for personal use.

      Such use would be incompatible because it would lure in fraud, which would ruin the reputation of shared comms resources like ip blocks, phone number blocks, etc..

      If you are doing real business, you are providing KYC as a daily matter in procurement, thereby protecting consumers from Sybil scum.

      • inigyou 5 hours ago
        > thereby protecting customers from Sybil scum

        No? Firstly you can't do a Sybil attack when each identity costs actual resources, and secondly you can still have lots of phone numbers, they just know who each one belongs to.

  • nttylock 8 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • marsven_422 10 hours ago
    [dead]
  • hiherer 12 hours ago
    [dead]
  • buffer_overlord 16 hours ago
    That’s huge
  • teravor 12 hours ago

        > Because we own the infra, the per-token price reflects the cost of running the model, not the cost of renting someone else's plus their margin.
    
    
    is not compatible with

        > Pricing on Telnyx: $2.70/1M input tokens, $13.50/1M output tokens, $0.27/1M cached input tokens.
    
    since you asserted something false and bizarre, how about telling us what is your markup?
    • alexeldeib 12 hours ago
      Why are those incompatible? Pricing is 10% under moonshot, and pure infra providers also want money
    • gruez 12 hours ago
      I don't get it, what's the contradiction supposed to be?
    • rubslopes 12 hours ago
      They are selling it even cheaper than Moonshot AI. Why are you so sure they are lying?
      • teravor 11 hours ago

            We estimate that the true blended price per million tokens for running Opus 4.7 on agentic tasks at $0.99 despite the sticker price being $5/$25 per MTok.
        
        https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/ai-value-capture-the-s...

        according to Semianalysis those prices would be far above actual costs.

        • petu 7 hours ago
          They're not saying anything about Anthropic serving costs in that quote, just calculating what MTok price is for running agents. Next sentence after your quote:

          > Agentic workloads have extremely high input-to-output ratios (our Claude Code usage has a ratio of about 300:1) and high cache hit rates (90%+). Because cached input tokens only cost $0.50/MTok, most of the tokens end up in the cheapest tier.

          90% cache hit input blend: 0.9 * $0.5 + 0.1 * $5 = $0.95 per MTok.

          300:1 input/output blend: (300 * $0.95 + $25) / 301 = $1.03 per MTok.

          They don't say exact cache hit rate they calculated for ("90%+"), so close enough.

        • Grimblewald 5 hours ago
          Please correct me if I'm incorrect, but it seems to me those numbers are describing a fairly different situation to this one. Anthropic serving their own model to their own users at that scale gets cache hit rates and machine utilisation that someone standing up another company's 2.8T model in four regions isn't going to get, and this thing needs 64 accelerators minimum before it will run at all, so a rack sitting mostly idle through a quiet hour costs the same as a busy one. The margin figure quoted is also just the price against the cost of producing the tokens, it doesn't have buying the hardware in it, or depreciation, or maintenance, or the money they'd have made renting those machines out instead, which with rental prices up 40% since October isn't nothing.

          I largely agree things are overpriced, I just don't think that article is the right basis for saying it about this one.

        • tpm 7 hours ago
          If they are indeed far above actual costs, then surely price discovery will be done by the overall market in due course.
        • FergusArgyll 11 hours ago
          **reflects** the cost...

          Not the **literal** cost