Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking
The first Kimi VL Thinking release adds extended visual reasoning to Kimi VL Instruct. Its weights remain published, but Moonshot recommends the separate Thinking-2506 revision for new use.
Longer reasoning without a larger decoder
The original technical report describes the Thinking model as a further-trained variant of Kimi VL. It targets long-horizon reasoning while retaining the same sparse decoder size. This is a training-stage distinction, not an increase from a small model to a larger dense model.Kimi VL: original technical report
Keep the April and June results separate
The official project marks the original Thinking release as deprecated and identifies the June checkpoint separately. That recommendation concerns which weight release to use; it does not establish that the original files have been removed.Kimi VL release history and model recommendations
Practical guidance. For a historical comparison, pin the exact checkpoint. Do not replace the original model with the June revision while keeping its old label or benchmark result.
Specifications & access
| Detail | Value and conditions |
|---|---|
| Launch date | April 2025 |
| Access | Downloadable |
| Model identifiers | moonshotai/Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking |
| Context window | 131,072 tokens Published checkpoint context limit; visual tokens and text share this budget. Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking checkpoint configuration |
| Training ancestry | Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct, followed by long-chain-of-thought supervision and reinforcement learning.Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking model card |
| Parameters | Approximately 16 billion total; 2.8 billion active in the language decoder.Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking model card |
| Weight license | MIT.Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking model card |
| Publisher recommendation | Superseded by Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-2506; original files remain available.Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking model card |
Related models
- Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-2506
Moonshot AI · Kimi VL
Revised visual-reasoning model with higher-resolution image input and improved video understanding.
Launch date Downloadable - Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct
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Launch date April 2025Downloadable