Kimi K3.1 Pro goes open, and open models carry most of OpenRouter
An open-weight model is one anyone can download and run on their own computers. Moonshot AI released the weights of Kimi K3.1 Pro on Hugging Face. It got 532 points on Hacker News and lots of buzz on r/LocalLLaMA. One Reddit user argues it is 'likely benchmaxxed', meaning tuned to look good on tests. That is one person's analysis, not a verdict.
A Reddit post citing dirac.run says DeepSeek alone made 53% of the 27 trillion tokens on OpenRouter in one day. Tokens are the small pieces of text a model reads and writes. OpenRouter is a service that sends requests to many models. Open-weight labs together pass 75%, the post says. In the US, Ricursive released Ripple-65B Preview, which it calls the best US open-weight model for agentic coding (292 points on HN).
Running models at home has hurdles too. A post with 600 HN points says encrypted firmware on Nvidia's RTX Spark cuts inference speed to 35% on Linux.
Strong models are now free to download, and on one big platform they carry most of the traffic. That is good for cost and control. But once a model is out, nobody can call it back, and safety depends on whoever runs it.
