Kimi K3 vs SAM 3
Compare Kimi K3 and SAM 3 side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Object Detection.
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Kimi K3 vs SAM 3 Comparison Table
Evals updated July 10, 2026Pricing updated July 17, 2026
| Property | Kimi K3 | SAM 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Moonshot AI | Meta |
| Category | open | closed |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Jul 2026 | Nov 2025 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | — |
| Parameters | 2.8T | |
| License | Modified MIT | Proprietary |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Object Detection | Demo | Demo |
| Captioning | Demo | |
| classification | Demo | |
| Document Question Answering | ||
| Instance Segmentation | ||
| OCR | Demo | |
| Promptable Concept Segmentation | Demo | |
| Video Object Tracking | ||
| Vision Language | ||
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | |
| Zero Shot Segmentation | ||
| Model Features | ||
| Foundation Vision | ||
| LLMs with Vision Capabilities | ||
| Multimodal Vision | ||
| Zero-shot Detection | ||
Kimi K3 vs SAM 3: Overview
Kimi K3 is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts large language model developed by Moonshot AI, with 2.8 trillion total parameters and a 1-million-token context window. The model activates 16 out of 896 experts per token using the Stable LatentMoE framework, and is built on two architectural innovations: Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), a hybrid linear attention mechanism that enables up to 6.3x faster decoding in long-context settings, and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), which selectively retrieves representations across model depth and delivers roughly 25% higher training efficiency. Together with refined training and data recipes, these structural advances yield approximately 2.5x better overall scaling efficiency compared to its predecessor Kimi K2. The model applies quantization-aware training from the supervised fine-tuning stage onward, using MXFP4 weights with MXFP8 activations for hardware compatibility. Thinking mode is always enabled at launch, with reasoning effort configurable via the reasoning_effort field.
Kimi K3 supports native visual understanding alongside text, accepting image inputs for tasks that combine software engineering and visual reasoning. It targets long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and agentic workflows, and ships in two variants: K3 Max for general chat and agent tasks, and K3 Swarm Max for large-scale parallel processing across many coordinated sub-agents. The model is compatible with the OpenAI SDK via an OpenAI-compatible API. Full model weights are scheduled for release by July 27, 2026 under a Modified MIT license, following the open-weight pattern established by the Kimi K2 model family. A technical report with full architecture, training, and evaluation details is expected to accompany the weights release.
Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.
Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.
Frequently Asked Questions
Kimi K3 is released under Modified MIT, while SAM 3 uses Proprietary. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.
Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for object detection in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.