📉 Clouded Judgement: Open Weights, Closed Prices?

📉 Clouded Judgement: Open Weights, Closed Prices?
Jamin Ball examines Kimi K3, a new 2.8-trillion-parameter MoE model that becomes the largest open-weights model ever released when its weights ship July 27, with a 1M-token context window built for long-horizon agentic coding. Unlike prior open models that undercut frontier pricing by 5x or more, K3 is priced at a blended ~$5.40 per million tokens - much closer to Opus 4.8's $9 and GPT 5.5's $10 than to GLM 5.2's roughly $2 blended rate. Ball argues the model's sheer size (needing 64+ GPU supernodes to serve) breaks the historical link between 'open' and 'cheap.' The piece also updates public SaaS valuation multiples: the overall median EV/NTM revenue multiple sits at 3.7x, with high-growth names (>22% NTM growth) trading at a 19.8x median versus 2.9x for low-growth peers.
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