The dark side of the moon has made another big move

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

The super AIGC application is still on the eve of an outbreak, and AI large model companies are all striving for this goal. The Moon's Dark Side, which once stood out with its "long text" ability, has thrown another heavyweight bomb into the market.

Recently, the Moon's Dark Side officially released the Kimi Exploration Edition. The biggest feature of this version is its AI autonomous search capability, which can simulate the human reasoning process. According to the evaluation team feedback, Kimi Exploration Edition has a comprehensive advantage in answer accuracy and completeness, surpassing similar products by at least 30%.

The search function of the Moon's Dark Side is further developing towards intelligence, aiming to strengthen the AI search mind and further enhance Kimi's overall performance.

Becoming a super application in the AI era is already an industry consensus. AI search has become one of the most crowded tracks, but a clear industry landscape has not yet been formed.

According to Wall Street observations, most domestic AI companies, including Tencent and Baidu, have laid out AI search. On the foreign front, Perplexity AI has also seen rapid development this year, and recently received a new round of financing of $250 million, with a valuation increasing from $1 billion in April to $3 billion.

In terms of product functionality, Kimi Exploration Edition is more intelligent. Firstly, it can autonomously plan strategies, like an analyst planning the overall strategy for solving problems by decomposing complex problems into hierarchical sub-problems. Secondly, it can automatically conduct large-scale information retrieval. In addition, it can also improve answer quality through instant reflection.

In short, Kimi Exploration Edition is like a business-savvy assistant, providing higher-level answers.

Wall Street reports that the search volume of Kimi Exploration Edition is 10 times that of the regular version, allowing users to read over 500 pages in a single search. The product manager of Kimi Exploration Edition stated, "In the future, search engines will become a tool that AI is better at calling upon. AI can autonomously search through the vast internet with the model's own capabilities, accurately locating the required answers."

How Kimi Exploration Edition will perform next still needs to be validated in the market. What can be confirmed is that the Moon's Dark Side is far from relaxing.

Recently, there have been rumors in the market that someone among the "AI Six Tigers" has abandoned pre-trained models. Although the Moon's Dark Side is not the subject of suspicion, in the increasingly worrisome AI large model race, the Moon's Dark Side still needs to continuously prove itself.

From establishment to becoming the highest valued unicorn, the Moon's Dark Side only took a little over a year.

As of May this year, the Moon's Dark Side has completed four rounds of financing, becoming the most intensively financed AI unicorn. The pre-investment valuation of the most recent financing round reached $3 billion, making it the highest valued company among AI large model startups.

Behind a series of financings and high valuations, the Moon's Dark Side continues to strengthen its products, which is also the core indicator by which the outside world judges the strength of AI companies.

In October 2023, the Kimi Intelligent Assistant was officially launched. About half a year later, Kimi upgraded its long text capability from 200,000 words to 2 million words, and quickly stood out by being able to read a 200,000-word novel in one go With Alibaba, Baidu, 360 and other major companies following suit, AI large model products are ushering in a battle of long texts. This is not only a phased victory for the dark side of the moon, but also injects a strong stimulant into the industry, causing the Kimi concept to sweep through the capital market.

According to the 2024 Autumn Report recently released by QuestMobile, in August, the monthly active user base of the Kimi intelligent assistant app reached 8.34 million, making it the company with the highest number of users among AI startups. In the past six months, the number of Kimi users has grown by over 40%.

However, AI large model technology is undergoing rapid iterations, and it has been half a year since the emergence of long texts. The competition of AI native applications has shifted from text to multimodal, and the market is now focusing on how the dark side of the moon will respond next.

In particular, while Kimi's user base ranks at the forefront domestically, there is still a long way to go globally.

In this unprecedented global AI competition, the dark side of the moon has a long way to go to achieve world leadership