Tencent may invest in the dark side of the moon, continuing to compete with Alibaba for the title of "AI's top gold owner"

Is Tencent also investing in Moon's Dark Side?

On May 21st, according to All-Weather Technology News, the large-scale startup Moon's Dark Side is currently undergoing a new round of financing, with investors including Tencent and GGV Capital, with an expected pre-investment valuation of $3 billion.

It is reported that in February this year, Moon's Dark Side completed Series A financing with an amount exceeding $1 billion, with investors including Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Meituan, Alibaba, and existing shareholders.

When Moon's Dark Side launched the first version of the Kimi chatbot in October last year, it could handle up to 200,000 Chinese characters in a single Q&A session. By March this year, the upgraded Kimi can now handle 2 million Chinese characters.

According to data from web analytics service Similarweb, within a week of the launch of the new Kimi, Kimi's website traffic surpassed Baidu's AI chatbot Wenxin Yiyuan, becoming the most visited chatbot in China.

Subsequently, Baidu and Alibaba successively upgraded their own LLMs and introduced long-text processing capabilities.

The rapid development of LLM startups like Moon's Dark Side is not an isolated case.

In the United States, only a few companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are developing state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), while China has dozens of LLM startup companies, giving a taste of a "hundred-model battle."

The continuous flourishing of domestic large language model startups is not only due to the financial support of venture capitalists but also relies on the technological and financial support of tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba with large cloud businesses.

Alibaba has already invested in Chinese startups developing large language models, such as MiniMax, Zero One Wanwu, Zhipu AI, Baichuan Intelligent, and Moon's Dark Side.

Tencent, on the other hand, has invested in MiniMax, Zhipu AI, and Baichuan Intelligent.

According to insiders, Tencent's consideration of investing in Moon's Dark Side this time is likely to pave the way for deeper cooperation between WeChat and Kimi.

Tencent and Moon's Dark Side declined to comment on this matter.

In addition to investing in some startup companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which have large cloud computing businesses, are also developing their own LLM models.

Alibaba created Tongyi Qianwen in May last year, and Tencent followed up by launching Hunyuan Big Model in September last year, targeting the needle at the wheat.

For domestic internet giants entering the era of stock competition, whether it is self-developing large models or aggressively investing, there is a sense of FOMO, after all, what if they hit the next OpenAI jackpot?