At the end of last year, WPS, a well-known domestic office software, announced that the domestic personal version of WPS Office would officially close third-party commercial advertisements. As we all know, the advertising business has always been one of the most important sources of income in the domestic Internet industry, and the Kingsoft Office behind WPS dares not to sell advertisements to individual users, and this reliance is that the number of paid subscribers of WPS continues to grow rapidly. However, just recently, the membership subscription service, which is the backbone of WPS's revenue, has come to the forefront.
Recently, some consumers have reported on the Internet that there are nesting doll charges in WPS. One of them said, "I bought a 'super member' in Kingsoft Office Software WPS, and soon after I added money to buy a 'super member' with AI functions, and now a pop-up window appears - if you want to continue to use AI functions, you need to pay to upgrade to a 'big member'."
Regarding this problem, the relevant person in charge of WPS said, "Member users used to use the AI function as a benefit, and now the benefit period has arrived. In March 2024, WPS AI will be commercialized, and the investment is relatively large. As a brand new membership service, WPS AI membership is still in grayscale testing and is a paid upgrade option. ”
Users complain about the existence of "nesting dolls" in WPS's subscription service, which actually makes some sense. Because in the past year, WPS's consumer-facing paid subscription system has undergone two major adjustments. Among them, on April 19, 2023, the official WeChat account of WPS office assistant announced the upgrade of membership services, merging the original "WPS member", "rice husk member" and "super member" to launch "WPS super member", and provide two packages: basic and Pro. At the same time, WPS said that in order to respect the wishes of users, it will retain the original member purchase entrance for 3 months and open it until July 31, 2023.
This operation also means that after April 19 last year, there are at least 5 different types of members in WPS. What's more fatal is that under this wave of AI, Kingsoft Office has built a set of AI product lines for WPS with AIGC (content creation), Copilot (intelligent assistant) and Insight (knowledge insight) as the selling points, and has begun to fully embrace AI.
Previously, in mid-November last year, WPS announced that WPS AI, an AI office application based on a large model, was open to all users and opened to all users one after another, of which individual members can receive it once a month and is valid for 31 days. It is reported that WPS AI supports mainstream office components such as text, tables, PPT, and PDF, and can provide more than 20 AI functions such as quickly drafting documents, processing complex function formulas, and assisting in reading long texts.
That's right, in order to promote the first generative AI application to land, WPS was offering WPS AI as a free benefit to patrons. In the words of Bi Xiaocun, senior vice president of Kingsoft Office, "AI has changed the way of thinking and working habits at work, and many people are willing to try it."
In a sense, at present, there are quite a few users complaining that WPS repeatedly charges for AI functions, and it is likely that it is the benefits received by virtue of membership during this period. It's just that since it is a "public beta", there will definitely be commercial operation in the future. In mid-March this year, the WPS membership system changed again, retaining the basic package of WPS super membership, canceling the WPS super membership Pro package, and adding WPS AI member/WPS big member.
At this time, WPS Super Member and WPS Super Member Pro no longer provide WPS AI-related functions and benefits, and only 25 yuan/month AI members and 35 yuan/month large members can use the capabilities of WPS AI. In other words, some users complained that there was a nesting doll fee in WPS, but when WPS tested WPS AI, the AI function was provided to all member users as a free benefit, but with the commercialization of WPS AI, the corresponding benefits were only used as a benefit for specific types of members. Out of loss aversion, it is actually normal for affected users to complain.
So the question is, why doesn't WPS launch the AI feature as a benefit for all members? Of course, it's because of the high cost, after all, every reasoning is not cheap, and it is impossible to cover all of its 35 million paying users. At present, Kingsoft Office is based on the open source base for training, and the self-developed models with parameters of 7B and 13B have not yet been implemented, and WPS AI is supported by Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan.
At present, the AI industry uses tokens as a unit of cost measurement and billing, and Baidu's charging standard for Wenxin Yiyan's latest ERNIE 4.0 series is 0.12 yuan/1,000 tokens for input and output.
According to the calculation that 1 Chinese character requires 2 tokens, it takes 2.64 yuan to make WPS AI summarize a 10,000-word document and output a 1,000-word summary. More importantly, the AIGC content output by the AI model cannot enjoy the benefits brought by the scale effect, and its marginal cost is diametrically opposed to that of traditional Internet products. The AI model needs to calculate each of the user's needs, which means that as the scale of users increases, if the technology continues to maintain the status quo, then Baidu needs to provide more computing power for Wenxin Yiyan.
This is also why Baidu founder Robin Li specifically emphasized in Baidu's 2023 earnings conference call not long ago that Baidu has continuously reduced its reasoning cost since the release of the Wenxin model, and it has now dropped to 1% of the version in March last year. However, in any case, AI models are different from traditional Internet products, and the lack of scale means that no manufacturer dares to provide relevant services to users without restraint. Therefore, after the publicity period, ChatGPT has Plus users and Wenxin Yiyan has members, so it is normal for WPS not to provide AI services to basic subscribers.
After all, it is the resource of the manufacturer to provide users with the ability to provide large models through the cloud, and the user's own equipment is responsible for providing computing power, heat dissipation, and energy. Therefore, WPS's subscription service does not actually charge for matryoshka dolls, but just plays first-hand price discrimination, and uses this way to attract users who need WPS AI to buy more expensive AI members.