Author / Baked buns under the stars
Edit/Spinach's Starry Sky
Typesetting/Beef jerky under the stars
Recently, a company that has only been established for one year, the dark side of the moon, has become popular, and the reason is that it has released a large-scale model product with outstanding effect - Kimi, which has gained wide user attention and positive feedback from the market in a short period of time, which directly shocked the entire AI circle.
In the capital market, a large number of investors are paying attention to the Kimi concept sector, looking to see who can take off. The stock prices of players such as Color News (300634), Chinese Online (300364), and EclickWorld (301171) are all relatively high.
Kimi Concept Plate
To become the most beautiful boy in the AI track, you must have some real talent. In the subdivision of context input length, Kimi's updated model supports 2 million words of lossless context input. To know this result, it is equivalent to 20 times that of GPT-4Turbo.
Kimi's excellence
Therefore, well-known players such as Alibaba, Sequoia China, and Xiaohongshu have stood on the platform of the dark side of the moon, like a catfish, and have entered the AI field with lightning speed.
So, how deep is the "moat" of the Kimi model, and will domestic large-scale model players be able to support it from now on?
1. A mountain is higher than a mountain
In fact, not only Kimi, but the AI large model track has not been calm at all in the past two years. To put it simply, a large AI model refers to a model with a large structure capacity, a large number of parameters in the structure, and a large amount of data. Players expect it to empower a wide range of industries.
Iron striking still needs its own hardness, and large model players have been frantically iterating on technology recently, hoping to be able to "attract attention" and "attract capital".
For example, in March this year, the number of ChatGPT visits exceeded 1.7 billion again, an increase of 9% month-on-month, which is close to the highest value in history. And it loosens the restrictions, and users can use it without registration.
In addition, Google, which is also eyeing large models, also implements a million token context with its Gemini 1.5. In the field of AI video, Sora, who was out of the circle before, has released the first MV, and the video concretizes the picture depicted in this song, bringing the infinite imagination of industrial players in just two minutes, becoming the first person to eat crabs.
AI models
Back to Kimi itself, the author believes that its core selling point is not only long texts, but also an important link for free and no threshold. After all, the dilemma that domestic users are currently facing is that the large models released by domestic players are either paid or have internal testing qualifications, and their eyes are turned overseas, and it is believed that it is difficult for most users to access ChatGPT. Moreover, after the author's test, Kimi's own understanding of Chinese is undoubtedly better than that of foreign models.
Second, the fire was very sudden
Then you may have to ask, how can a company that has been established for a year squeeze those big Internet companies out of power?
In fact, the logic behind it is mainly from the perspective of investment recovery, because long text consumes a lot of computing power and has a high cost, in fact, many industry players think that it is not cost-effective.
Kimi web page visits
Therefore, the dark side of the moon has taken a path that everyone does not want to take, and it is more user-friendly, coupled with the amount of marketing purchases, the right time and place, which has contributed to such a result.
Judging from the current situation of large models in the market, many players are mainly targeting the B-side, opening the market through AI functions + the logic of the original products, such as GPT-4 being connected to Microsoft's Office, and iFLYTEK will also release the iFLYTEK Xinghuo cognitive model in 2023, etc., achieving the effect of 1+1 greater than 2.
3. A money-burning game
The Kimi model is taking a different path, and the differentiated C-end route it takes means that burning money seems to have become one of the important grasps for it to get out of the circle. According to the author's understanding, if you consider its advertising and computing costs, Kimi's cost per user reaches 12-13 yuan, and according to its downloads, the daily customer acquisition cost exceeds 200,000 yuan.
The speed at which this money burns is jaw-dropping. It is reported that the dark side of the moon is advancing commercialization and producing paid content (which is also expected to be difficult for users to accept). It seems that when the company can't achieve profitability, no matter how good the product is, it will be difficult to continue.
What's more, after seeing the widespread demand for long texts from Kimi, domestic Internet giants also quickly joined the competition. For example, Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Qianwen opened up the 10 million word long document processing function to everyone for free, and 360 Intelligent Brain announced the official internal testing of the 5 million word long text processing function, etc.
Moreover, according to the author's understanding, the dark side of the moon behind Kimi is also actively carrying out capital operation, and in February this year, it leveraged an investment of $800 million with a pre-investment valuation of $1.5 billion, of which Alibaba accounted for the majority (part of the capital contribution will be settled by the computing power provided by Alibaba Cloud). The soaring valuations have also made many investors feel unattainable.
But in fact, Kimi's most urgently needed Ali computing power should not have been fulfilled at present (the computing power mainly uses bytes of volcanic clouds). This is undoubtedly very critical for model training.
So, to be honest, the field of long texts is also difficult to be Kimi's moat. If you burn money, I believe that even if this startup company has the blessing of capital, it will be difficult to PK with Internet giants for a long time.
After all, the patience of capital is also limited.
Note: This article does not constitute any investment advice. The stock market is risky, and you need to be cautious when entering the market. There is no harm in buying and selling.