How do people like Kimi?
I'm probably using Kimi wrong or there's some magical prompt out there but the hours I've given it a fair chance, every response is just..weird. Like it tries to hard. Take this dialogue Bring the big first-aid kit and a strawberry shake. No, no ambulance, just sugar and sutures. And maybe a distraction that isn’t me.. It brings in so much random stuff so fast and it's borderline incoherent. It never keeps the same pacing of a story and there's no narrative stability. It's quirky but not in an entertaining way. The pattern of observing one element in a story, introducing a related one and then making some zinger has made me never want to use it, it's probably the most annoying roleplaying experience I've tried to deal with with expectations above a 70b. I don't really see any critisms against it and had that typical honeymoon phase of 'New model being the best thing ever, better than claude' fanfare that tends to die down, but I could never even see the initial hype.
That writing sample sounds like the temperature is a bit too high: Not grammatically incorrect, but getting kind of word salad-y.
I haven't used Kimi myself, but might it be one of those models that needs an absurdly low temperature to function because it's actually starts to go incoherent at 1?
track me
This. I usually run Kimi at 0.65, never higher than 0.85.
I used Kimi a while back and got the absolute best replies I had ever seen, but I did have to use the trick of sending the first message with a more stable model (Claude 3.7), for Kimi to follow its track and understand the idea better.
But recently, Kimi has been kinda just disappointing. Not sure if the 0905 update caused that.
Kimi OG is much better than 0905. The new one has a large positivity bias the og didn't. The upside is it degrades less over long context
Kimi K2 has the tendency to get "meme-y" when it writes fiction. I don't know how else to describe it. You have to esplicitly prompt against it. It's one of those models that doesn't do well with the usual big multi-modal highly specific and often contradictory presets floating around. Also as others have said, low temperature. 0.3 to 0.7 (absolute max).
Kimi K2 works best when you just continue an already established story or start without much fanfare or an "ooc-dialogue". It has the tendency to work really well with some story archetypes, but not with others. It's usually always worth at least a try.
Im guessing is because of that. That randomness makes the model actually more interesting than just 'coherent' ones.
Its about taste, thats all. Theres no 'perfect' model.
I love Kimi K2 0905. Best model I’ve used for creative writing. Some tips.
Recommended temp from the developers is 0.6. It gets weird higher than that.
In the “Aa” tab of ST you can use the drop down boxes to select the “Moonshot” presets, since Moonshot AI developed the model.
The model is sensitive to what you tell it to do in system prompts and character cards. If your system prompt has a lot of instructions to be “creative and unexpected”, it can get out of hand pretty quickly. Likewise with “surreal, bizarre, unusual, magical realism,” etc, things get really crazy. If you’re noticing the model is doing X to much, you can ask it why it did X or you can look through the system prompts or character card for something that might be causing X.
The model is very good at keeping track of multiple characters in scenes but the more characters you add the more likely it will make mistakes. Up to four characters is very good, starts to make mistakes or forget about people at more than that. You may have to edit its replies to smooth out odd details.
Around 50k+ tokens you may start running into repetition issues (new response is same as one it used earlier.) Seems to be an issue with ST, not the model. As others have found with ST in the past, you can get around this deleting the last response and your last reply, then closing the chat, opening another character’s chat, then closing that and going back to your original chat.
Use chat completion mode and a good roleplaying/writing preset. This one works well. https://old.reddit.com/r/SillyTavernAI/comments/1m28518/moon_kimi_k2_preset_final_form/
Recommend adding a line to the list of prose instructions in that preset, something like “Refrain from using idioms and cliched expressions such as “breath hitched” and “smell of ozone” - overall the LLMisms are better than a lot of other models but they are still there. (Too much low-quality wattpad content in the training data?)
Recommend editing the preset to define your desired voice and tense. I changed it to close third person, present tense on the whole thing, in two different places where voice/tense are mentioned in that preset.
The nsfw toggles in the preset are very handy. Writing without nsfw: leave them off. Writing smut: turn nsfw and raw nsfw on. Writing romance: only turn on slow burn. Sex scenes happening too fast? Add a prompt to this section of the preset called “slow sex” and instruct it: “Allow sex scenes to progress slowly through a back and forth interaction between {{user}} and {{char}}. Do not complete sex scenes in a single reply.”
Also, which nsfw toggles you use depends a lot on your character’s description. If your character card has “traits: saucy, flirty, horny, dirty mind” you probably don’t need any of the toggles turned on to write nsfw.
Edit: also, specifying a genre for your story can really improve results. For example, adding/editing a prompt to your preset with “Story genre: We are writing a supernatural vampire erotica story with heavy BDSM elements” will get you way closer to writing the next 50 Shades of Gray than if you just try to steer the story that way during the chat. Kimi seems to really pay attention to this; I definitely recommend it if you’re writing a certain type of thing.
It less prone to using "GPTisms" than most other models, but it is also a complete schizo
Thanks everyone for the response. I've had a few different preset, Q1F, Haru, and a couple universal ones. I tend to keep temp around 0.7 for all models I use but the anecdotes will help troubleshoot.
What preset are you using? I hear Loggo's is good
I gave Kimi a try and it just didn't hit right for me (GPT/Grok fan here.) I didn't feel like putting in the time to learn how to prompt it either, though.
I really liked the original Kimi K2 but Kimi K2 0905 is really weird. I still love the prose, but it's really hard to wrangle and prone to serious hallucination. Haven't managed to find good settings for it and every time I try, it behaves in unexpected ways.
The prose is unique, even beautiful at times, but it's creativity is a mixed bag. On one hand, it might be nice for OC cards that like leaving stuff to interpretation. But on the other, if you're using an intricately written card (especially with a character from an established universe), then Kimi's creativity tends to lend itself more towards hallucinations than anything else.
Definitely a fun model to try if you want to mix things up. Does an alright job at NSFW stuff, too.
It's pretty dope. I was running it with Guided Generations (thinking, clothes, state turned on) and was pleasantly surprised on how well it followed instructions for a non-thinking model.
It's a really bizarre model, practically unusable for me. No matter how I test it, I get a bunch of results that read like schizophrenic ramblings.
Recommended temp from the devs is 0.6. It gets schizo above that.
From my experience:
You have to use a preset, without one it's just.. Not very good
I don't think it's on the same level as Claude, but it's still pretty decent, slightly below GLM-4.5, but it has a pretty unique writing style.
I tried it and found it to be too censored to be even remotely usable.
Having played with the model quite a bit, that sample feels like the temperature may be a little too high. Kimi K2 as a model runs pretty hot.