Kimi K3 Now Available via Telnyx Inference API

129 points by fionaattelnyx 22 hours ago on hackernews | 81 comments

buffer_overlord | 22 hours ago

That’s huge

smallerize | 22 hours ago

Very cool. What are your throughput and latency like?

LoganDark | 19 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.

nujabe | 16 hours ago

There were new regulations passed to combat robocalls that forced these companies to tighten up.

oxidant | 12 hours ago

10DLC in North America

illliillll | 14 hours ago

You can go on telegram and pay someone $10 to do the KYC for you.

tomr75 | 13 hours ago

hi nsa

TZubiri | 13 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 | 11 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.

contactdq | 5 hours ago

We've been fighting this battle with the FCC. They tried fining us (and then dropped it), but they continue to push the issue via NPRMs. We generally think KYC is ineffective due to ID mules. It's obviously a privacy issue as well.

jakswa | 19 hours ago

what quantization? FP4?

NitpickLawyer | 16 hours ago

The model is native mxfp4 w/ mxfp8 activations via QAT.

trollbridge | 5 hours ago

I have some morbid curiousity about what K3 would be like in an FP16 or FP32 model.

teravor | 18 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?

gruez | 18 hours ago

I don't get it, what's the contradiction supposed to be?

alexeldeib | 18 hours ago

Why are those incompatible? Pricing is 10% under moonshot, and pure infra providers also want money

rubslopes | 18 hours ago

They are selling it even cheaper than Moonshot AI. Why are you so sure they are lying?

teravor | 17 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.

FergusArgyll | 17 hours ago

**reflects** the cost...

Not the **literal** cost

If they are indeed far above actual costs, then surely price discovery will be done by the overall market in due course.
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 | 11 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.

theredsix | 18 hours ago

10% cheaper than official! Let the inference pricing wars begin!

norbert515 | 11 hours ago

I'm really curious how far and how fast prices will drop (if at all)!

Mossy9 | 14 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

bedros | 13 hours ago

any of these providers are HIPAA compliant?
Amazon Bedrock, but they don't have this model yet

contactdq | 5 hours ago

At Telnyx, we are willing to enter into a BAA. Just hit up our sales team.

madhu_ghalame | 13 hours ago

Consider publishing latency, throughput, and cost metrics under different workloads to help teams make informed decisions.

TZubiri | 13 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 | 12 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 | 11 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?

trollbridge | 5 hours ago

I think Microsoft is still trying and failing to figure out what this X-Box thing is.

contactdq | 5 hours ago

Yeah, the pypi thing sucked, and we've taken the necessary measures to prevent something like that from happening again.

We're moving past "telephony" and focusing on building more agentic primitives at the telecom edge.

This isn't a recent jump. We've been on this path for some time.

Disagree with you on the customer support side and re: decapitalization in general. People will want to talk to competent bots. We have people literally prompting our AI agents (which are capable of doing troubleshooting) in our shared Slack channels. You simply cannot beat the speed with which they can provide a quality response.

We remain committed to delivering the highest quality product at the lowest possible price point - across all of our product lines.

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 | 11 hours ago

Well this is a very large and expensive model. Try something like Qwen-7B if you want ultra-cheap.

neuroticnews25 | 10 hours ago

Larger than Mythos? How is that?

philjohn | 7 hours ago

I thought Mythos was rumored to be around 10tn parameters? Kimi k3 is 2.8tn.
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

TZubiri | 12 hours ago

Bootleg AI

Grimblewald | 12 hours ago

if this qualifies bootleg, point me at non-bootleg frontier ai.

victorbjorklund | 11 hours ago

croes | 10 hours ago

That’s how a smoking gone turns into a water pistol

lukewarm707 | 9 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)

FooBarWidget | 12 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.
This happens with other models too - Gemini often identifies as ChatGPT for me, confusing many a debugging attempt

Razengan | 9 hours ago

It's distillations all the way down!

cleaning | 12 hours ago

How many times do people need to point out that every model has this behavior until this stops being posted?

tomashubelbauer | 12 hours ago

FWIW Claude sometimes identifies as DeepSeek when asked in Chinese: https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101

victorbjorklund | 11 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 | 8 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 | 8 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 | 8 hours ago

But I would expect they would at least use post-training to discourage identifying as the wrong company.

XenophileJKO | 7 hours 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 | 8 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 | 7 hours 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.

croes | 10 hours ago

Could be on purpose to disguise as a US made model

Razengan | 8 hours ago

The meme/trope of China copying everything really keeps playing into itself

w4yai | 7 hours ago

Models don't know who they are. Stop asking this question to the model as a source of truth.

maelito | 13 hours ago

Where is it hosted ?
Atlanta, Denver, Paris, Sydney: https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/inference/models/regions

The top text says MENA as well, but the regions page doesn't mention it.

maelito | 2 hours ago

Thanks !

mesmertech | 10 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

hmokiguess | 9 hours ago

Who is "you guys"? Telnyx?

DaSHacka | 8 hours ago

Well, the OP's username is "Fiona at Telnyx"

hmokiguess | 7 hours ago

I kinda realized my question was dumb afterwards, I think I misread the question lol thanks

ljlolel | 6 hours ago

This (Telnyx) is available on TrustedRouter.com

addandsubtract | 6 hours ago

Soon, we're gonna need a router for all the different routers.

morpheuskafka | 9 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 | 5 hours 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.

contactdq | 5 hours ago

It's not a rapid pivot. We've been doing AI stuff for quite some time, particularly on the voice side. Soon, you'll see more from us on the physical AI side. Our GPUs are colocated next to our mobile core, so as we roll out vision models, you'll be able to do things like agentically pilot drones with low latency.

tokai | 9 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.

hmokiguess | 9 hours ago

Is it also offered via a ZDR + BAA / HIPAA eligible? Would love to use it in prod

apexalpha | 9 hours ago

Is this an ad?

Why is this provider specifically on the front page?

Also why is this not available over openrouter?

heisgone | 8 hours ago

I don't mind it as long as the company engage in the comments. They haven't so far.

contactdq | 5 hours ago

here now.

ljlolel | 6 hours ago

This (Telnyx) is available on TrustedRouter.com

blackoil | 5 hours ago

Maybe, but how is it different than post for new Macbook?

contactdq | 5 hours ago

Co-founder/CEO here. Not sure how we got to the front page, but we'll take it.

We've been trying to get on OpenRouter. Just reached out to their CEO. Would be great if people could request it as well.

We're unique in that we have B300 in USA, EU, UAE, and AUS.

Also, building out other agentic primitives like stateful actors (in beta, but will be rolled out globally in the coming weeks):

https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/edge-compute/stateful-act...

Also, if you're doing things agentically, check out AI repo:

https://github.com/team-telnyx/ai

ivanvanderbyl | 27 minutes ago

Do you guys provide ZDR? We’ve been waiting for someone to offer inference in Sydney on decent GPUs for a while but we’ve got strict no logging or retention requirements.
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.