> the training cost of the model(s) that Kimi distilled?

The distillation process involves getting conversation traces from the model you are distilling from, and then training your model against them.

You still have to do the training!

I believe they are talking about the closed models' training costs.

I other words, the providers that will be offering K3 inference don't have any training costs to offset, so they are only charging for the inference itself. OAI/Anthropic would need to offset their R&D and training costs in order to not be selling API access at a loss.