China-developed AI chatbot goes viral with ChatGPT-like services

Kimi AI, a China-developed AI chatbot, is going viral online, making it potentially a ChatGPT-like AI tool in the Chinese language world, Shanghai Daily has learned.

Kimi, developed by startup Moonshot AI founded in March 2023, offers free services to assist users with their queries, offering information, support, and companionship in the vast digital realm, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Since March there has been a dramatic surge in downloads, as the No. 1 app in iPhone's productivity category in China, and a huge volume of visits to the WeChat mini-program and webpage, even becoming temporarily clogged with unexpected huge traffic.

It has become a new star in the bustling world of artificial intelligence, attracting visits and usages and fueling shares of related enterprises, covering partners, users and suppliers.

"Kimi traffic continues to increase at a high rate, to accelerate the landing of consumer-end applications of domestic (AI) large models," said Huatai Securities in a research note.

The spotlight innovation of Kimi is so-called "lossless long context," supporting up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt. It helps users to deal with 90 percent of tasks in high-efficiency and high-quality generated results, according to a company's tech file.

It can analyze 100-page financial or law files within minutes and give semi-professional results, quickly find the hidden plot in a one-million-character novel, aid step-by-step creation starting from a sentence or a webpage and issue coding.

Kimi's long-enough context capacity enables it with contextual memory, complex task processing, reduction of information fragmentation and multiple rounds of coherent dialogues. It then brings optimized and accurate results and further adaptation with specific demands, making it suitable for millions of ordinary users.

Comparatively, free ChatGPT services (GPT 3.5) offer limited token capacities and abilities, often leading to inaccurate, unrelated and even funny results, especially in Chinese language usage. Meanwhile, ChatGPT service is not easily registered and used in the Chinese mainland.

"Kimi is the most used GPT product lately, especially it understands Chinese a bit better than ChatGPT," said Li Geng, co-founder of QbitAI, a popular technology website.

Kimi also offers qualified English language services. It will bring English results when "asked" in English prompts, Shanghai Daily found.

Kimi will kick off mutlimodal AI models later this year, covering text, image and video, which offers features like Sora and Stable Diffusion, the company said.

The "Kimi wave" stimulated tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu, which are said to be developing long context services and kick off them soon, according to media reports. It makes sense as there is still a lack of an efficient Chinese language AI tool, easily accessed and used and offering high-quality results, like ChatGPT.