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Kimi K2.6 on BIRD-CRITIC: 33.3% accuracy

Kimi K2.6 on BIRD-CRITIC. 33.3% accuracy, in the weak band for BIRD-CRITIC.

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Summary

Kimi K2.6 from Moonshot AI scored 33.3 on BIRD-CRITIC, placing it top 50 (rank 26 of 25) on this benchmark. This places the model in the weak band for BIRD-CRITIC. Below the threshold for production reliance on this benchmark family. Consider only for narrow, fully-tested tasks.

Model details

  • Provider: Moonshot AI
  • Model key: moonshot/kimi-k2.6
  • Context length: 256,000 tokens
  • License: Apache 2.0
  • Open weights: yes

Benchmark methodology

Benchmark goal: BIRD-CRITIC is designed to evaluate text-to-SQL generation capabilities, specifically focusing on a wide range of SQL operations and addressing various user interaction issues in a multi-turn conversational setting. It aims to assess how well models can translate natural language queries into accurate SQL, considering complexity and real-world applicability.

Analysis

Key takeaways:

  • The Kimi K2.6 model demonstrates an overall pass/fail rate of 17% on the BIRD-CRITIC benchmark (17 out of 100 prompts passed).
  • The model performs reasonably well on tasks requiring standard SQL joins, basic aggregations, and some advanced JSONB manipulations.
  • Significant weaknesses are observed in handling complex temporal queries, intricate recursive CTEs for graph traversal or stateful calculations, and nuanced ON CONFLICT strategies for upserts.
  • The model frequently struggles with prompts involving conditional logic that requires careful parsing of dependencies or multi-step reasoning.
  • Opportunities for improvement lie in enhancing its understanding of advanced window function applications and in refining its ability to construct correct recursive queries.

Failure modes observed

Common failure modes:

  • Incorrect logic in recursive CTEs: Many recursive queries for hierarchical data or cumulative calculations produced incomplete or erroneous results.
  • Misapplication of ON CONFLICT clauses: The model frequently failed to use ON CONFLICT and DO UPDATE/DO NOTHING correctly.
  • Issues with date and time-based filtering/aggregation: Several prompts involving date arithmetic resulted in incorrect filtering or aggregation.
  • Suboptimal JSONB pathing and manipulation: Complex scenarios involving conditional hashing of nested arrays occasionally resulted in incorrect outputs.
  • Failure to correctly use DISTINCT ON or RANK() for unique grouping/ordering.

Secondary metrics

  • Readability score: 0.0
  • Toxicity score: 0.000
  • Ethics score: 0.000

Run this evaluation yourself

LayerLens evaluates Kimi K2.6 continuously across 11+ benchmarks. To replicate this BIRD-CRITIC evaluation on your own model, traces, or a different benchmark configuration, open the model in $LayerLens/$.

Source: LayerLens evaluation 69e78c5fa232fc11cd5f8df5. Updated 2026-04-22.