Was just as excited as everyone else to read this cool new paper, and it felt like a trip down memory lane!
XM seems to be the same as IMLE, and the motivation and insights are also similar. Having worked on IMLE for years, I'll provide some context for my followers 👇.
1/n
i love that our generation managed to kill the stereotype that if you have tattoos, you won’t be able to find a job.
now nobody can find a job, whether you have tattoos or not.
I’ve been saying for over a year. DeepSeek’s discovery of RL for reasoning in r1 is independent from o1 technology, the only commonality is what OpenAI had disclosed. And this is a case in point. Only OpenAI has truly mastered “reasoning effort”. It’s intrinsic to their method.
Incredible.
Math notoriously have long latency from discovery to applications.
Euler’s 1763 theorem became RSA encryption in 1977 and now helps secure the internet.
Riemann’s 1854 geometry became relativity in 1915, then GPS in 1978.
Shannon’s 1948 information theory became the foundation of modern communications and the internet.
There's an opportunity here for people to see what breakthrough solutions unlock the next frontier.
We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by e.g. "create an svg of pelican on a bicycle". As one idea to generalize it, I was interested what Opus 5 would do if I gave it the first paragraph of the Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10) and asked for three js render of it. Opus went off for ~2 hours and wrote 5500 lines of code that (procedurally) rendered the story. It's kind of janky but fun. But it's a bit mindboggling that the LLM has to place and orchestrate various polygon assets in (x,y,z) coordinates and write code that animates it all, and that it even does anything at all.
I also like this kind of examples because no one in their right mind would ever spend the time to write something this custom but LLMs have all the stamina and patience in the world, so it's an example where we go from "no one would ever do this" to "sure, why not, it's ~free". There might be a lot more. But I'm excited about creating hyper custom worlds that you can imagine dropping players into, e.g. here to participate in the LoTR story as a spectator NPC, or one of the characters, or etc. Something like an ephemeral GTA of X on demand.
Last thought is that the domain of worlds/games exposes a weakness in LLMs: they can't easily audit their work because they aren't able to efficiently and natively perceive videos or play games within them. Here, Opus 5 had to very slowly and painstakingly take screenshots at different points, and it messed up a few times and created a bunch of jank. An example of raw capability (multimodal, gameplay) that I think is still quite lacking.
If i ever get back into dating and discover that someone i thought I'd really clicked with was using an ai assistant to manage our relationship the whole time i would kill myself in a way that redefines how the world thinks of suicide
The Kimi K3 architecture figure for yesterday's big open-weight model release, along with some observations and thoughts.
1. Yes, it looks relatively complicated, but it's essentially a scaled-up production version of their Kimi Linear model they released last year (scaled up from 48B -> 2.8T; K3 is by far the biggest open-weight model right now)
2. The one new component compared to Kimi Linear is the LatentMoE. I omitted it in the figure below since it's already very crowded, but that's essentially the same LatentMoE as in Nemotron 3 Ultra (you can find it in my LLM Architecture Gallery if you are curious). The idea here is to compress (down-project) large linear layers similar to multi-head latent attention.
3. Kimi K3's overall trend (similar to Nemotron 3, DeepSeek V4, and others) is also towards better inference efficiency. That is, there are many components that replace existing components with efficiency-tweaked versions. I.e., MoE -> LatentMoE, regular attention -> multi-head latent attention and Kimi Delta Attention. (I also have short tutorials and write-ups in my gallery if you are curious about additional details).
4. The one component change that is not an efficiency tweak is attention residuals. Like DeepSeek V4 improved the residual path with mHC (manifold-constrained Hyper-Connections), attention residuals are a way to improve the residual path, but it works a bit differently. I.e., mHC made the residual path wider. Attention residuals (also already part of Kimi Linear) connect the residuals across layers; the connection itself uses an attention score for an important/contribution weight. According to the report, it improves the validation loss and downstream performance (a bit) consistently and adds about 4% in training cost and 2% in inference cost.
5. Interestingly, Kimi K3 got rid of all RoPE layers and uses NoPE (No Positional Embeddings) everywhere instead. (Again, this is inherited from Kimi Linear). In other architectures, the recent trend was towards RoPE in local attention layers (like sliding window attention) and NoPE in the global layers. There were a few architectures that only used NoPE everywhere, but this is the first frontier-level one as far as I know.
6. Kimi K3 now also has native multimodal support, which is great!
There are several other interesting training tidbits in the technical report, but that's it from the architecture front so far. A really great release overall.