Multimodal capabilities of Kimi K3 are obviously not working. It can’t recognise what is on an attached image/screenshot at all. Can’t read text on screen and hallucinates instead.
Steps to Reproduce
Open fresh chat
attach image to prompt, ask it what’s in the image
Read Kimi’s surreal hallucinations, mostly based on filename and containing directory
Expected Behavior
Kimi is supposed to be able to use it’s multimodal capabilities
Hey, thanks for the detailed report. I can see the screenshot. It’s the KCD Global Map with small legend text and marker labels. This isn’t a broken feature, it’s expected behavior, and here’s why.
Kimi K3 in Cursor isn’t a natively multimodal model, so it doesn’t receive the image itself. When you attach an image to a non-vision model, Cursor runs it through a separate helper model that writes a text description, and only that description is sent to Kimi. So the model gets the general scene, but it can’t reliably read small text like marker labels or the top panel. It only has the description plus the file name, not the pixels. That’s why it can look like hallucinations.
For screenshot tasks like reading UI text, labels, or error dialogs, use a natively multimodal model like Grok 4.5, Claude, GPT, or Gemini. You already noticed Grok 4.5 can read the content well, and that’s because it gets the image directly.
About it not being clearly stated anywhere that Kimi K3 isn’t natively multimodal, that’s a fair point. I’ll pass it to the team so it’s clearer in the UI and docs.
Let me know if a multimodal model still can’t read something correctly, then we can dig deeper.
Actually it’s clear that there is no helper model either, or at least it’s not working. It genuinely can’t find out anything about the contents of the image, not directly nor through a helper model. It literally just goes off filename, directory and chat context, I’ve checked. It can’t see anything at all in the contained image. This should definitely be well communicated because of how confidently the model hallucinates and pretends that it does see something.
