Seizing the "new continent" of the AI era, Zhihu (02390) launches "ZHIHU-W Direct Answers" to vigorously advance into the AI search blue ocean

In the past two years, with the continuous and leapfrog development of the artificial intelligence industry, more and more companies at home and abroad have been investing in this technological competition. Recently, SoftBank Group's Vision Fund invested a valuation as high as $3 billion in the startup company Perplexity, which focuses on the frontier field of "AI search", attracting wide market attention. It is worth noting that since its official establishment in August 2022, Perplexity has been in existence for less than two years, but even so, the latest round of financing has made it one of the highest valued startups in the global AI field.

As the saying goes, "hear the song and understand the elegance". Taking the latest trends in the overseas AI field as a reference, perhaps just like Columbus discovering the New World back then, the future of human society will inevitably have a closer connection with artificial intelligence. In the midst of a new wave of the times, how domestic enterprises will reach the "New World" of the AI era and even become the builders of the "New World" in the AI era has become a question that must be answered in this era.

Regarding this, at the recent 10th YAN Club New Youth Conference, Zhihu (02390, ZH.US), one of the first domestic companies to engage in the development of large Chinese models, provided the latest "answer". At the conference, Zhihu's founder, chairman, and CEO Zhou Yuan delivered a speech and announced the latest AI product from Zhihu, "Zhihu Direct Answer".

It is worth mentioning that "Zhihu Direct Answer" is not Zhihu's first AI product to be implemented. Looking back in history, at the two "Zhihu Discovery Conferences" in 2023 and 2024, Zhihu respectively released the "Zhihu Map AI" large model and the community-native AI feature "Discovery·AI Search". If these were the two key steps for Zhihu to complete the transition from model development to open product application, the newly released "Zhihu Direct Answer" is the formal productization of Zhihu's AI search function, marking Zhihu's continued strong entry into the "deep waters" of AI application with an enterprising attitude.

The Latest "Answer" to Explore the New "Continent" of AI

As an influential interdisciplinary knowledge event, the YAN Club New Youth Conference of Zhihu selects several hot topics for pioneering discussions every year. And at the 10th YAN Club New Youth Conference that opened on June 29th this year, AI unsurprisingly became the biggest highlight of the event.

Finance and Economics APP noticed that prominent figures such as Li Kaifu, CEO of Zero One Lab and Chairman of Innovation Works, Li Dahai, CEO of Mianbi Intelligence, and Zhang Peng, founder and president of Geek Park, shared their cutting-edge perspectives and insights on the big model innovation wave at this conference.

And if we were to discuss the most significant event at this conference, it would undoubtedly be Zhihu's release of the brand new AI product "Zhihu Direct Answer". According to Zhou Yuan, "Zhihu Direct Answer" is not only a new productivity tool but will also serve as a connector for discovering the world. In the future, "Zhihu Direct Answer" will help everyone better "discover the world through questioning" and build a more imaginative, creative, vibrant, and lively community around tools and every individual As an AI search application product, the emergence of "Zhihu Direct Answers" may not be accidental, but rather a "fruit" that Zhihu will inevitably yield after going all out in the field of AI. In 2023, Zhou Yuan publicly stated that Zhihu would "embrace AI", and it was in that year that Zhihu launched the "Zhihu Map AI" large model.

The latest release of "Zhihu Direct Answers" marks Zhihu's official productization of AI search functionality. It is understood that "Zhihu Direct Answers" is based on real Q&A data from Zhihu creators and can provide two types of answer generation results according to user needs: "concise" and "in-depth".

Compared to the pain points of traditional search engines that mechanically list search results and cannot accurately locate the best answers, "Zhihu Direct Answers" supports "finding content" and "finding people", not only shortening the distance between content needs and high-quality answers but also placing more emphasis on content sources and amplifying the circulation effect of community creators and their content.

In the view of Intelligent Finance APP, the Zhihu community has a natural synergistic effect with AI search. Therefore, in the future, "Zhihu Direct Answers" will inevitably play an increasingly important role in Zhihu's product system: on the one hand, as an important tool to help users ask questions, "Zhihu Direct Answers" can trace the source of content, increasing the credibility of information; on the other hand, by searching for answer providers through "finding people", it can increase the degree of interpersonal connections and strengthen the community's interactive experience.

Currently, "Zhihu Direct Answers" has an independent domain name and service entrance, and has been launched on the PC side. Users can access it through the domain name "zhida.ai". It is also revealed that at the current stage, "Zhihu Direct Answers" is still continuously learning and evolving. In the future, this product will advance in both "technology-driven" and "product-driven" modes. Meanwhile, Zhihu will also gradually promote app development and the introduction of multimodal capabilities. While achieving deeper integration with the Zhihu community, it will also explore the possibility of external cooperation in a more inclusive manner.

The "New Turning Point" of Investment Value

From a macro perspective, Zhihu's strong entry into AI search applications can be seen as a microcosm of the most enterprising innovative companies exploring the "new continent" of AI in the current era.

In terms of the latest developments in the AI field, some industry views believe that a 10-fold reduction in inference costs for the entire large model industry per year is an expected outcome, and this is also a high probability event. Once large-scale cost reduction is achieved, the widespread benefits of large models will become a reality, and AI applications will inevitably experience a more extensive and significant outbreak.

In fact, the rapid changes in the field of AI applications can already be described as "making progress by leaps and bounds". Taking search engines as an example, as of April this year, there are three search engine applications with monthly global visits exceeding tens of millions. Among them, New Bing ranks first with 1.55 billion visits. As a non-native AI application, its high visit volume indicates that traditional search engines are making progress by leveraging AI technology to empower existing search services. Perplexity ranks second with 73.53 million visits. As a native AI search engine, its high visit volume reflects the huge market potential and commercial application prospects of AI search engines

The positive progress on the industrial side has also excited the capital market. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, recently, a fund under the leadership of Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group invested in Perplexity company at a valuation of as high as $3 billion in the latest round of financing. It is understood that Perplexity is currently seen by the outside world as one of the most likely AI search engines to challenge Google's position. Even in an interview earlier this year, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA stated that Perplexity is his most frequently used AI tool, with a frequency reaching the level of "almost using it every day".

Taking Perplexity's phenomenal performance as a reference, it is foreseeable that entering the AI era, AI empowering traditional search will be the trend, and AI-native search engines are more likely to reshape the existing search landscape. Drawing lessons from this, the "post-90s generation" represented by Zhihu in China will also rise up, and the release of "ZHIHU-W" may be a key step for Zhihu to advance in the blue ocean market of AI search.

Zhitoong Finance APP believes that compared to traditional search engines, Perplexity's advantages mainly lie in four aspects: the ability to understand user queries, the ability to summarize search results, the ability to retain search result indexes, and the ability to expand user queries.

It should be pointed out that these abilities mentioned above are exactly the directions that "ZHIHU-W" is striving for. It is expected that in the AI era, exciting stories about breakthroughs in technology and business fields will continue to unfold in China, and Zhihu is one of the companies that is particularly worth paying attention to. With the iteration and evolution of "ZHIHU-W" in the future, this product is also likely to achieve outstanding market performance similar to Perplexity.

In the face of the wave of the artificial intelligence era, Zhihu, which has actively entered the field, has clearly made sufficient preparations. With the realization of growth expectations for AI products such as "ZHIHU-W" in the future, the investment value of Zhihu as a technology-driven tech company will inevitably be reassessed by the secondary market, and the company's growth prospects are worth investors' optimistic expectations