I started playing with Kimi K3 through OpenRouter yesterday. Open weights, out of China, the biggest model anyone has dropped so far. And it does the thing the big western models keep deciding they're too responsible to do - it actually helps you.
calle is the reason I tried it. He had a pile of security bugs in his own software. Codex said no, guardrails. Fable said no, guardrails. Kimi K3 just fixed them.
«I have a report full of security issues of a software I'm working on. Codex won't fix them because of cyber guardrails. Fable won't fix them because of cyber guardrails. Kimi K3 fixed them all. No restrictions, just gets the job done. This will end badly for OpenAI & Anthropic.» - calle
Think about what actually happened there. It's his software, his bugs, his own code to fix. The models he pays for wouldn't touch it. The free one just did the work. Every time I hear "safety" I now ask who it actually stops, and the answer is usually the person trying to fix their own stuff.
calle asked the other thing I keep coming back to - will the US try to ban open models once it decides they're dangerous? They went after encryption. They're still going after bitcoin. Open intelligence is the same kind of thing to them, and I'd bet it goes the same way both of those did - out the door and impossible to pull back. So the tech wins either way. The only people who get caught short are the ones waiting for permission to use it.
Jeff Booth:
«Because prices fall to the marginal cost of production in a free market, AI will trend towards abundant and free. It is a horizontal, general-purpose technology - like electricity, rather than a network-effects-driven, company-owned monopoly. Any moat will be short-lived.» - Jeff Booth
Intelligence is turning into electricity. Nobody picks a favourite electricity brand, nobody frames the power bill - you flip the switch and the light comes on. Meanwhile the closed labs are lighting hundreds of billions on fire to wall off a thing that wants to be everywhere and nearly free. Kimi K3 beat Fable and GPT at coding this month, and the full weights go public on July 27th. Soon you run frontier-grade intelligence on your own box and it doesn't ask who you are.
So here's the thesis, plainly. Open source is how you win the long game. It's cheaper today, sure, but that's not really the point. The point is it's the only version nobody can take back from you. Rent a closed model and you're a tenant, and that's fine right up until the landlord changes the locks.
Straight about what I'm actually doing - I run K3 through OpenRouter, and OpenRouter wants an account and a card. Not sovereign, I know, and I won't act like it is. It's the quick way to feel the difference before you can host these things yourself. The real move is the weights on your own machine, or paying by the question in sats through something like Routstr, where nobody writes your name down. That one gets its own write-up once I've lived on it. For now I'm using the landlord's tools to go find a house.
Fix the money, then fix the intelligence. Few understand.