Kimi K3’s chain-of-thought uses 12× more tokens to dominate rankings
Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 outperforms its predecessors by a wide margin, but does so by spending over 12× the reasoning tokens of Claude Opus 4.8 and twice the tokens of Kimi K2.6. Its edge comes from a multi‑stage chain‑of‑thought that iteratively designs and even writes code during reasoning, trading speed for higher quality output.