Move Over ChatGPT: China’s Kimi AI Might Be The Next Big Thing

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Kimi AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing, and that is not something hidden from anyone. But it is interesting to see how other countries are also joining the race especially China already making waves in the sector. Chinese AI like DeepSeek, Kimi AI, and others have sent shockwaves through not just the tech world but financial markets as well, by developing much more advanced technology at a fraction of the cost of its rivals.

DeepSeek’s announcement this week caused the stocks of giants like Google, Nvidia, and others to crash heavily. The company unveiled its breakthrough chatbot, R1, and claimed that it was built using just $5.6 million, compared to the billions spent by competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Over just the weekend, DeepSeek’s chatbot even dethroned OpenAI’s crown jewel ChatGPT becoming the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store in the United States along with ranking high on other app download charts.

Besides DeepSeek, there are other Chinese players too gaining attention, and among them is Kimi AI chatbot which is also being compared as a strong competitor to ChatGPT’s monopoly over the AI sector.

Is Kimi AI Truly The Next Big Thing?

The AI chatbot Kimi was developed by Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup founded in March 2023. This rise of AI development in China supposedly started after OpenAI restricted the use of its development software and tools in July 2024.

As per a report by BNN Bloomberg, Beijing requires that any company must be approved before they can launch their chatbot in the country, this restricts many Western companies from providing its AI technology to Chinese consumers.

Moonshot AI then developed the Kimi chatbot, similar to the ChatGPT by OpenAI that quickly became popular among Chinese users. Kimi is not the only one to gain popularity with ByteDance Ltd.’s Doubao and Baidu Inc.’s Ernie also having users in the millions in no time.

The company founded by Yang Zhilin has already gotten significant funding from domestic big firms like Alibaba, Tencent, and more. A May 2024 Financial Times report claims that Moonshot along with “four Chinese generative artificial intelligence start-ups have been valued at between $1.2bn and $2.5bn in the past three months”.

Moonshot is reported to be valued at over $3 billion after its latest fundraising round. The report also reveals that there are around 260 more such companies working in the AI sector to compete with US biggies in the sector.


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The Kimi chatbot was launched in October 2023 and is powered by Moonshot AI’s self-developed Kimi large language model (LLM) and nicknamed the “Chinese ChatGPT.” LLM is the technology used to train generative AI services like ChatGPT.

Kimi Chatbot also upgraded to be able to process and respond to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt from its earlier 200,000 in March of last year.

Users can upload PDF files or web pages to the chatbot for analysis, and engage with Kimi AI in a manner similar to ChatGPT by typing their prompt and getting human-like text responses.

Data from Aicpb.com revealed that Kimi recorded around 12.6 million visits in March of 2024. An industry insider was quoted in the FT report saying that “Kimi has done a good job on their user interface and contextualising the content through RAG.”

RAG is the technique of retrieval-augmented generation where models gather data from external sources and use that to answer the queries or prompts submitted by the user.

Now, the latest Kimi k1.5, a multimodal AI model, is said to match or even outperform the OpenAI 01 model. Moonshot AI claims that Kimi can now outperform OpenAI o1 by responding to harder and more complex problems, especially in areas including mathematics, coding, and even being able to comprehend text and visual inputs such as photos and video.

Another report by The Indian Express claims that the Kimi k1.5 has even surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4o and is said to be a “true competitor to o1.”

The reason why it’s being considered revolutionary is because Kimi k1.5 is multimodal, separating it from being just another AI model. The use of reinforcement learning (RL) and multimodal reasoning along with being able to process multiple kinds of data such as visual data, text, and code to solve problems all while being touted as having been built at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI has got the attention of many.

According to the Indian Express report, “Kimi k1.5 has scored 96.2 on MATH 500, which is better than OpenAI’s GPT-4 variants. It scored 77.5 on AIME (math benchmark) and 94th percentile on Codeforces (coding-related problems). The model also surpassed GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on numerous benchmarks by up to 550 percent.”

China is working extensively to broaden its artificial intelligence sector, with reports revealing how billions are being invested into AI.

As per a report by The Economic Times, an AI investment fund of 60 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) was created last week especially after the US placed new restrictions on chip export.

Beijing is also said to be investing in the semiconductor industry to increase its manufacturing of advanced computer chips, supposedly to reduce its dependency on technology from outside the country.

There are also talent programs and incentives introduced by companies regarding AI along with plans to include AI into the education system by starting AI academies and adding to school curriculums itself.


Image Credits: Google Images

Sources: The Indian Express, South China Morning Post, Firstpost

Find the blogger: @chirali_08

This post is tagged under: Kimi AI, Kimi AI chatgpt, china ai, ai, artificial intelligence, chatgpt, openai, america china ai, deepseek, deepseek china, deepseek ai, kimi ai chatbot

Disclaimer: We do not hold any right, or copyright over any of the images used, these have been taken from Google. In case of credits or removal, the owner may kindly mail us.


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