Text丨Sina Technology Zhou Wenmeng

Kimi exploded, and the big domestic model suddenly began to “roll up” long texts.

Over the next two days, major Internet companies such as Alibaba and 360 have successively announced the ability to process long texts of 10 million words and 5 million words. According to other sources, Baidu will also open up long text capabilities, and the text range will be 2 million to 5 million words.

A “siege war” surrounding Kimi is unfolding.

Among the three star products that have been officially announced to have long text capabilities, as far as the current public beta version is concerned, Sina Technology conducted three separate sample tests: When summarizing “Three Body 2: Dark Forest” and “A Brief History of the Future,” Kimi was only able to interpret 52% and 66% of the text content, while the other two companies each reached 100% interpretation. This also means that in the most common interpretation of novels and bestsellers, Kimi currently has no advantage, and there is even a gap with the big manufacturer's big model in some features.

An investor in the AI big model industry said bluntly to Sina Technology, “Long texts are not unusual in the tech world, and they are not as difficult as imagined.” Previously, it was limited by long texts, which consumed a lot of computing power and was expensive, resulting in fewer entrants. “Capital is concerned, now we have to enter the market and open the paper.”

Furthermore, he revealed that currently the customer acquisition cost of Kimi's advertising is about 10 yuan. If you take into account the computing power costs generated by user question-and-answer interactions after the launch, the customer acquisition cost for each user reaches 12-13 yuan. According to third-party platform download estimates, over the past month, Kimi's average daily download volume on Apple and Android devices was 17,805. Based on this calculation, Kimi's daily customer acquisition costs will burn at least 200,000 yuan.

Long text analysis, which one is better?

In fact, the technology for processing long texts is probably not scarce. In a short period of time, Ali and 360 announced the opening of this feature one after another, which can be confirmed.

According to official information from Alibaba, Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen made the 10 million-word long document processing function free of charge to everyone, making it the AI application with the highest document processing capacity in the world. A few hours later, 360 announced that Smart Brain has officially closed tested the 5 million word long text processing function, which will enter the 360 AI browser.

As far as the current beta version is concerned, Kimi, 360, or Ali, who has the better ability to process long texts? Sina Technology conducted three separate sets of tests:

Sample 1: Bestseller “A Brief History of the Future”;

Sample 2: bestseller “Trisomy 2: The Dark Forest”;

Sample 3: Sora's English paper “Overview of the Background, Technology, Limitations and Opportunities of Large Visual Models”.

(Kimi summed up “Three Body 2: The Dark Forest” and was only able to read 52%)

(Summary of “Three Body 2: The Dark Forest” by Tongyi Thousand Questions)

(360 Browser AI Assistant Summary “Three Body 2: The Dark Forest”)

Brief summary: In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, Kimi was only able to interpret 52% and 66% of the text content of the first two, which clearly lags behind both in terms of the degree of completion of the text interpretation; in terms of content analysis, all three have their own summaries, and 360 has added abilities such as summarizing and mind mapping.

Furthermore, in terms of online searches, etc., Kimi's demonstrated abilities also have certain limitations.

What is remarkable about detonating A-shares?

However, there is no doubt that “Dark Side of the Moon” is still the most popular AI company today. Judging from the financial background, the support of top internet giants, including Ali, Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Meituan, etc., has added a lot of mystery to this AI technology company that has just entered the A round.

In addition to the fact that the capital of the leading Internet industry has always been optimistic, there are three other reasons why the dark side of the Moon is currently receiving much attention:

First, the company's founding team is young and talented. The founder of the company, Yang Zhilin, is the most cited researcher in the field of NLP in China under 35, and the first author of two papers on Transformer-XL and XLNet, both of which are core technologies in the field of large language models. The company's other two co-founders, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, have also been exploring the big model path for many years.

Second, as a product created by a startup, Kimi quickly gained market attention, and Nikkatsu continues to approach products from major manufacturers such as Douban and Wenxin Yian. According to data released by the Huafu AI Internet team, as of March 3 this year, Kimi Applet+Web+App had 9038 million daily active users. Compared with Doubao Web+App with 2.68 million daily active users, the gap is narrowing continuously.

Third, in October of last year, Kimi was only able to support 200,000 words of lossless contextual input, but half a year later, the company recently announced that the closed beta supports 2 million words of lossless contextual input capability. In a short period of time, text processing capabilities have increased tenfold, and technology iteration is progressing rapidly.

Under the impact of a series of “exciting” news, Kimi has become the most noteworthy phenomenal AI product in China after ChatGPT, so it has also ushered in popularity in the A-share market. Recently, many individual stocks related to A-shares, such as Huace Film and Television, Zhangyue Technology, Zhongguang Tianze, and Haitian Ruisheng, which are related to Kimi, rose or stopped.

However, does Kimi's technological breakthrough really have anything to do with the sharp rise in the market capitalization of Kimi-related companies in the A-share market? The answer is probably no.

In communication with Sina Technology, a financial industry practitioner said that the sharp rise in Kimi's concept stock “is essentially a routine of speculating on concepts in the stock market; there isn't much underlying logic.” In his opinion, “The basic operation of a brokerage researcher is to find hot spots, then release some news, let retail investors copy them, then the institution withdraws to make money, and then get hedge fund credits from it.”

Regarding Kimi's excellent text processing ability, Li Liang (pseudonym), an investor in a well-known domestic model startup, told Sina Technology, “Long text is not unusual in the tech world; everyone can do it if they want to.” But why isn't everyone doing it? Li Liang explained, “The most fundamental reason is that long texts consume a lot of computing power, are too expensive, and entering the market is currently a last resort.”

Big model investors: the business model is still the biggest problem

According to Li Liang, “From the perspective of communication and positioning, a product only captures one point for promotion. It is indeed easier to penetrate the hearts of the people and make people remember. Currently, big models can promote mainly long texts and multi-modal understandings. Kimi focuses more on long texts, so it is also more likely to be noticed by the outside world.” However, as major internet companies begin to make efforts to process long texts, Kimi's situation may worsen as a result.

He further explained, “The long text processing capabilities that Kimi can provide can actually be provided by competitors such as Tongyi Qianwen and 360 Smart Brain. Therefore, as long as these big manufacturers don't charge a day, then such products can't accept money, so it can only keep losing money. This is one of the biggest problems we see in its business model from an investor's perspective.”

“Maybe you gave it a novel and let it be summed up, it would cost 5-10 yuan, but you didn't pay for it.” Li Liang pointed out, “Currently, Kimi's customer acquisition cost for advertising is about 10 yuan. If you calculate the computing power costs generated by user Q&A after the launch, the customer acquisition cost for each user may reach 12-13 yuan.”

According to Qimai's data download estimates, over the past month, Kimi has averaged 5,445 daily downloads on the App Store and 12,360 omni-channel downloads on Android. The total number of daily downloads is 17,805. Based on this calculation, Kimi's daily customer acquisition cost on Android+iOS will reach 213.66 million to 231.47 million. If you add the increase in customer acquisition through other channels such as websites and applets, Kimi's monthly customer acquisition costs are not a fraction.

“If Kimi continues this model without being able to find new revenue channels, this approach is tantamount to 'burning money to make shouting. '” Li Liang revealed, “Of the $1 billion financing recently obtained by Dark Side of the Moon, of the 800 million US dollars of financing for the first installment, Ali led the investment of 790 million US dollars. Of this, 600 million US dollars must be placed in a joint management account, and Alibaba Cloud related services must be consumed.”

“If they are unable to create a profitable business model in the future, their ultimate fate may be to be merged and acquired as part of Ali.” Li Liang speculated.