The meaningful difference
Both records list million-token context and closed provider access at the review date. Sol has shared reported benchmark evidence in the directory but higher listed token prices; Kimi K3 lists lower prices and a disclosed 2.8T scale, while its announced future weight release was not yet available when checked.
Choose by workload
Choose GPT-5.6 Sol when your priority is reported frontier reasoning, coding, and configurable OpenAI agent workflows. Its relevant strengths include frontier agentic and coding results and million-token long-context evaluations.
Choose Kimi K3 when your priority is lower listed token prices, native vision, and long-horizon coding through Kimi apps and API. Account for full weights were announced for a later date and were not yet available when checked before committing.
Specification comparison
| Measure | GPT-5.6 Sol | Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| Access | API + app | API + app |
| License | Proprietary | Unavailable |
| Context | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Provider-listed API input / 1M | $5.00 | $3.00 |
| Provider-listed API output / 1M | $30.00 | $15.00 |
| MMLU-Pro | — | — |
| GPQA Diamond | 94.6 | — |
| SWE-bench Verified | — | — |
| LiveCodeBench | — | — |
| SWE-Bench Pro | 64.6 | — |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index | 58.9 | — |
Price scope: Kimi K3's listed input value is its cache-miss API rate because the data schema does not represent cached-input pricing. Verify workload-specific billing before comparing total cost.
A fair test for this pair
Run the same long-horizon coding and knowledge-work traces with preserved conversation state. Measure accepted outcomes, tool errors, unnecessary actions, latency, retries, and total billed tokens; do not treat unlike provider-reported benchmarks as a head-to-head result.