Kimi K3 arrives in private preview on Snowflake Cortex AI

# What was announced

Snowflake announced that Kimi K3, Moonshot AI's open-weight large model, is now available in private preview on Snowflake Cortex AI. At launch preview users can call K3 through Cortex AI Functions and Cortex Inference. Snowflake says support for CoCo (code workflows), CoWork (collaborative research), and Cortex Agents is coming soon.

# What Kimi K3 is

Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model. It activates 16 of 896 experts per token and uses Moonshot's Stable LatentMoE framework. Moonshot reports a 2.5x improvement in scaling efficiency compared with Kimi K2. The model is presented as suited to tasks that require carrying context across many turns, combining multiple input types, and executing multi-step reasoning.

# Why Snowflake customers might evaluate it

K3's design targets workflows that span files, sessions, or documents rather than single-turn prompts. Snowflake highlights use cases such as:

• Repository-level development that traces calls across modules, runs tests, and maintains session state across a long coding task.
• Research workflows that combine literature review, executable code, validations, and visualizations.
• Agentic data workflows that coordinate tools and data across turns inside Snowflake's environment.

Private preview lets teams compare K3 to other models without a separate inference deployment, using their own tasks and quality requirements.

# How to call Kimi K3 on Snowflake

Snowflake shows multiple integration points:

• SQL: Cortex AI Functions bring model calls into SQL. The announcement includes an AI_COMPLETE example that uses 'kimi-k3' to compare fictional product research notes inside a single SQL call.

# Practical considerations

• Session state sensitivity: Moonshot recommends starting fresh sessions with K3 for bounded tasks and avoiding switching in the middle of an ongoing session with a different model, because K3 is sensitive to how conversation history is preserved.

• Feature rollout: At announcement time K3 is available in private preview via Cortex AI Functions and Cortex Inference. Snowflake lists upcoming support for CoCo, CoWork, Cortex Agents, and CoWork integrations that will expand evaluation into coding and agent workflows.

# Short summary