Instructions to use moonshotai/Kimi-K3 with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.
- Libraries
- Transformers
How to use moonshotai/Kimi-K3 with Transformers:
# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper from transformers import pipeline pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="moonshotai/Kimi-K3", trust_remote_code=True) messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"}, {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"} ] }, ] pipe(text=messages)# Load model directly from transformers import AutoModel model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("moonshotai/Kimi-K3", trust_remote_code=True, device_map="auto") - Inference
- HuggingChat
- Notebooks
- Google Colab
- Kaggle
- Local Apps Settings
- vLLM
How to use moonshotai/Kimi-K3 with vLLM:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install vLLM from pip: pip install vllm # Start the vLLM server: vllm serve "moonshotai/Kimi-K3" # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "moonshotai/Kimi-K3", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker
docker model run hf.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3
- SGLang
How to use moonshotai/Kimi-K3 with SGLang:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install SGLang from pip: pip install sglang # Start the SGLang server: python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "moonshotai/Kimi-K3" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "moonshotai/Kimi-K3", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker images
docker run --gpus all \ --shm-size 32g \ -p 30000:30000 \ -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \ --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \ --ipc=host \ lmsysorg/sglang:latest \ python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "moonshotai/Kimi-K3" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "moonshotai/Kimi-K3", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }' - Docker Model Runner
How to use moonshotai/Kimi-K3 with Docker Model Runner:
docker model run hf.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3
Serve Kimi-K3 on your own GPUs
For anyone trying to self-host K3: the weights are ~1.4 TB even in native MXFP4, which just barely fits on a single top-end 8-GPU node and leaves nothing for the 1M-token KV cache or throughput headroom. So it's multi-node, and in practice multi-cluster, since not many people have that much contiguous capacity sitting in one place.
That's the specific problem SkyPilot Endpoints targets. You describe the endpoint in one YAML and it stands up vLLM plus the autoscaler, gateway, cache-aware routing, and metrics across however many Kubernetes clusters you give it, behind one URL. Clusters are pooled rather than treated separately, so replicas go wherever there's capacity and get rebuilt on a healthy cluster if one dies, same URL.
Except the weights are not ~1.4 TB, as can be seen from a quick look at this repo...