Zhipu has become China’s largest startup by number of employees. It is a spinout from the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, which has produced many experts in the field of artificial intelligence. After the results of the last fundraising, which took place in March, Zhipu is valued at 18 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), according to two investors in the company. They did not disclose how much they invested themselves.
Moonshot, founded by Yang Zhilin, a former student of the founder of Zhipu, received a valuation of $2.5 billion following a $1 billion investment round in February. Yang previously interned at Google Brain AI and Meta AI and founded the startup Recurrent AI, which analyzed sales manager calls.
Moonshot, Zhipu, and 01.ai's products are aimed at office workers and nepal number data students: chatbots help process long texts and optimize search results. Neither Moonshot nor Zhipu responded to questions about their funding.
Moonshot Kimi chatbot has become the closest competitor to Ernie Bot, created by Chinese search engine Baidu. According to data provider Aicpb.com, Kimi had 12.6 million visits in March, while Ernie Bot had 14.9 million. At the same time, Kimi is growing much faster than its competitor.
But Kimi has become a victim of its own popularity. The easy-to-use chatbot, known for its concise narration and clear answers, is getting too many requests. In March, Kimi suffered a two-day outage, prompting the company to apologize.
Faced with the same problem of limited computing resources, many AI startups have chosen to work on avatars, which don't have to reason as rationally as generative chatbots. These programs are trained on smaller amounts of data, so they require fewer computing resources.