NLP Lineage

16 July 2026 · Multimodality

Kimi K3

Kimi K3

Kimi Team

Date
16 July 2026
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
Moonshot AI
Access
Kimi K3 open-weight licence
Other dates
open weights 2026-07-27
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 8. The weights get out
Learning phases
6. Local models and deployment

Too recent for its influence to be judged: no later milestone in the data descends from it yet. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (huggingface.co)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

K2 had reached a trillion parameters, text only.

The problem

Open models still trailed closed ones on multimodal and agentic work at the largest scale.

What it introduced

A multi-trillion-parameter open multimodal agentic model.

Why it matters

Open weights at a scale previously seen only in closed labs, with multimodality included.

What modern models inherit

The largest openly available models being multimodal and agentic.

What came next

Continued escalation at the open frontier.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

Kimi K3 has 50 documented ancestors across 10 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 21 turning points among them.

Kimi K3 has 50 documented ancestors across 10 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Kimi K3 has 68 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 24 turning points among them.

Kimi K3 has 68 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 12 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2026Kimi K3This milestone.
  2. 2025Kimi K2Kimi K3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2024GRPOKimi K2 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2024DeepSeekMoEKimi K2 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  5. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  6. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  7. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  8. 2023LLaMA Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  10. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  11. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  12. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  13. 2021RoPE Turning pointLLaMA built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  14. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  15. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  16. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  17. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  18. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointDeepSeek LLM built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  19. 2019Multi-query attentionGrouped-query attention built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  20. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  21. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  22. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  23. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  24. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointT5 was influenced by this
    Scaling laws was influenced by this
    GPT-3 built directly on this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  25. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  26. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  27. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  28. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  29. 2018GPT-1BERT was influenced by this
    GPT-2 built directly on this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  30. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  31. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  32. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  33. 2017Transformer Turning pointT5 built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  34. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  35. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  36. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on this
    GPT-2 built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  37. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  38. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointBERT was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  39. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on this
    LLaMA built directly on this    Chapter 2. Words become vectors
  40. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  41. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  42. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  43. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  44. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  45. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  46. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  47. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  48. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  49. 1997LSTM Turning pointSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  50. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  51. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2026Kimi K3This milestone.
  2. 2025Kimi K2Kimi K3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  3. 2024DeepSeek-V3Kimi K2 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  4. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  5. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  6. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  7. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  8. 2024GRPOKimi K2 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  9. 2024DeepSeekMoEKimi K2 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  10. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  11. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  12. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  13. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  14. 2023Process supervisionGRPO was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  15. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  16. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointDeepSeek-V2 / MLA was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B built directly on this    Chapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  17. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  18. 2023LLaMA Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on this
    Position interpolation built directly on this    Chapter 8. The weights get out
  19. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  20. 2022WhisperGPT-4o was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  21. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  22. 2022STaRProcess supervision was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  23. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  24. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointProcess supervision built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  25. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  26. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  27. 2021RoPE Turning pointDeepSeek-V2 / MLA built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  28. 2021CLIPGPT-4V was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  29. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  30. 2020Vision TransformerCLIP built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  31. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  32. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  33. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  34. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointDeepSeek LLM built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  35. 2019Multi-query attentionDeepSeek-V2 / MLA was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  36. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  37. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  38. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  39. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  40. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointT5 was influenced by this
    Scaling laws was influenced by this
    GPT-3 built directly on this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  41. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by this
    C4 was influenced by this (indirect influence)    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  42. 2019Transformer-XLRoPE was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  43. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  44. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  45. 2018GPT-1BERT was influenced by this
    GPT-2 built directly on this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  46. 2018ELMoBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2018ULMFiTBERT was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  49. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  50. 2017Transformer Turning pointT5 built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this
    RoPE built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  51. 2017RLHF originRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  52. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  53. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  54. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on this
    GPT-2 built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  55. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  56. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointBERT was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  57. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on this
    LLaMA built directly on this    Chapter 2. Words become vectors
  58. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  59. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  60. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  61. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  62. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  63. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  64. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  65. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  66. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  67. 1997LSTM Turning pointSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  68. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  69. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

No documented descendants are recorded for Kimi K3 without weak links.

No documented descendants are recorded for Kimi K3 without weak links.

No recorded descendants are recorded for Kimi K3.

No recorded descendants are recorded for Kimi K3.

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

What it led to

None recorded in the sources used.