Knowing that it has come to the most dangerous time

The wave of artificial intelligence craze caused by ChatGPT not only did not recede with time, but intensified, becoming a sweet potato for Internet giants to compete.

However, with the opportunity comes danger, especially for Zhihu, the "danger" component of ChatGPT is much larger than the "machine".

Will ChatGPT replace Zhihu?

ChatGPT, as an intelligent chatbot, currently mainly works in the form of "question and answer". You ask a question about it, and it gives a pretty solid answer. This is reminiscent of Q&A community knowledge.

Therefore, some people believe that the emergence of ChatGPT will have a huge impact on Zhihu, and even eventually replace Zhihu.

But is that really the case? In fact, those who know ChatGPT know that its advantage is to retrieve and filter content, organize and summarize ready-made answers, and save people time looking for content. At least at this stage, ChatGPT does not yet have the ability to be completely original.

Original content is the core competitiveness of Zhihu. Although there is a lot more "moisture" than the content of Zhihu ten years ago, Zhihu is still one of the best content platforms on the Chinese Internet at present, and the answers of many professionals on Zhihu have always had high reference value, and the length of time wakes up dreamers.

Especially for some open-ended questions, there are always people who can give novel ideas, which ChatGPT can't do. For example, experience problems, evaluating a mobile phone, users want to know the use of real people, rather than repeating the parameters over and over again; There are also evaluation questions, evaluating whether a movie is good or bad, users sometimes need extreme views to find recognition, rather than a bowl of objective answers.

In a word, Zhihu's advantage lies in "innovation". Even if many people call Zhihu "weaving" and "sharing the stories you just made", but have to admit that making up stories also requires innovative ability, false stories are often mixed with real life experience, ChatGPT can "copy" these stories at most, or stitch several stories together, but can not produce stories out of thin air.

With this alone, ChatGPT cannot replace Zhihu. The content community needs a steady stream of new content to maintain its vitality, and artificially created content contains the author's perceptual thinking and aesthetic taste, which cannot be achieved by pure rational artificial intelligence.

Therefore, in terms of content production, it is too early to say that ChatGPT has had an impact on Zhihu.

So, why is it said that ChatGPT will bring a crisis to Zhihu?

On the road of artificial intelligence, Zhihu has fallen behind

Artificial intelligence is not terrible, what is terrible is that Zhihu did not use artificial intelligence well.

In fact, if used correctly, ChatGPT can bring a lot of benefits.

When you ask ChatGPT "how ChatGPT will affect Zhihu", it will answer like this:

It can be seen that even ChatGPT itself knows that artificial intelligence is conducive to improving the quality of problems above Zhihu. Artificial intelligence algorithms can automatically filter low-quality questions to identify copied and pasted content and content that is also answered by artificial intelligence.

On the other hand, Zhihu's retrieval system also needs artificial intelligence. Friends who often use Zhihu know that it is difficult to search for high-quality answers, and there are often multiple identical questions, and the ordering is confusing. Artificial intelligence can help the "little housekeeper" merge similar problems, optimize the sorting rules, and give users a better browsing experience.

In short, artificial intelligence is just a tool, with advantages and disadvantages for itself, and it all depends on how it is used. So, can Zhihu use this tool well? Let's take a look at Zhihu's founder Zhou Yuan's attitude towards ChatGPT.

Zhou Yuan recently said that in order to avoid negative impact on minors, it is recommended that ChatGPT-related technology set age restrictions and filtering mechanisms to ensure that minors cannot access inappropriate content.

It's hard to imagine that, as the founder of Zhihu, he talks about ChatGPT instead of talking about how to exploit it, or launching his own ChatGPT, but restricting the use of this technology. And at present, ChatGPT itself has restricted inappropriate content, and from his statement, it is likely that ChatGPT has not been used in depth.

The founder's career often determines the upper limit of a company's development, and the prospect of Zhihu is very worrisome, and this concern is directly reflected in the stock price. The share price, which had risen a month ago due to the popularity of the ChatGPT concept, fell back in the following days and is now trading at just $1.32.

More importantly, Zhihu lacks the necessary technology and facilities to develop artificial intelligence, which is in its infancy, compared with other large manufacturers that have achieved certain results in the field of artificial intelligence. For example, Baidu already has four-layer full-stack capabilities of chip layer, frame layer, model layer and application layer, and has obtained the qualification to enter the artificial intelligence market.

Zhihu, which is still in the wait-and-see stage, does not know whether it can catch up with the high-speed train of artificial intelligence.

Zhihu's moat is not deep enough

Although Zhihu is unlikely to be replaced by ChatGPT, it is likely to be replaced by other Internet products.

For example, as an emerging content community, Xiaohongshu has seized the minds of users in life-related fields and become the first choice for people to query answers. Taking the topic of "tourism" as an example, the travel strategy on Xiaohongshu is concise in layout and rich in illustrations and texts, which is very suitable for the needs of light tourism audiences. On the other hand, the content on Zhihu is increasingly hollowed out, and many high-quality content is four or five years ago, lacking new blood, resulting in the loss of users.

As for the root cause of user loss, the "moat" of Zhihu is not deep enough. In order to achieve profitability, Zhihu accelerated the process of commercialization too early, and launched advertising, e-commerce, knowledge payment and other businesses, although the user base was expanded, but also reduced the quality of content, and the reputation was not as good as before.

We might as well compare the foreign "Zhihu" quora. In order to maintain the quality of the content, Quora reviews questions very strictly, even the first letter is not capitalized, no question mark is limited, and the staff will regularly clean up some "unfriendly" content. More importantly, Quora is not in a hurry to make a profit, but maintains the rigor of the content and avoids the platform content becoming entertaining. And the "serious" answers above Zhihu are becoming fewer and fewer, and the "Zhihu spirit" of asking the bottom is slowly dissipating.

In fact, not only Zhihu, many domestic Internet products are too "utilitarian". Taking artificial intelligence products as an example, Baidu's chatbot is used in Xiaodu AI and its home appliance derivatives as soon as it can talk; As soon as Ali's conversational robot could speak, it was used in Taobao customer service robot. It's like a child who just finished junior high school and was pushed out of the door by the family to work to earn money, thus limiting the upside.

Too much attention is paid to finding profit scenarios, achieving short-term arbitrage, and ignoring long-term value, which is a common problem of Zhihu. The less accumulation there is, the easier it is to be replaced, as is the case with people, and so are products.

Author | Clear air