Moonshot AI’s Kimi narrows gap with Baidu’s Ernie Bot

Competition among Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots is heating up, as the product from Moonshot AI, a 12-month-old start-up, has overtaken Alibaba Group Holding’s Tongyi Qianwen and is narrowing the gap with domestic leader Baidu’s Ernie Bot, according to new data.

Moonshot AI’s Kimi saw total traffic to its website and app reach 12.6 million views in March, more than quadruple the number from a month earlier, according to AIcpb.com, a site that tracks the popularity of AI products.

As a result, Kimi overtook Tongyi Qianwen to become China’s second-largest chatbot, behind Ernie Bot.

Data from AIcpb.com showed Ernie Bot attracted nearly 15 million views last month, up by 48 per cent, while the Alibaba service had 5.2 million visits, an increase of 44 per cent.

Li Bangzhu, founder of the AIcpb.com site, said that unlike the products from Baidu and Alibaba, which were often used for general purposes, Kimi was known for “dealing with specific scenarios” such as analysing long text, which might contribute to its popularity. Alibaba owns the Post.

But “Kimi isn’t going to overtake Ernie Bot any time soon because the latter has a very huge [user] base”, which was still growing, Li added.

Nevertheless, Chinese generative AI giants still lag far behind global leaders. Last month, total traffic to OpenAI’s ChatGPT rose by 9 per cent to 1.86 billion views, remaining the world’s most popular generative AI app, according to AIcpb.com.

The surge in traffic to Kimi came after an announcement of a technological breakthrough that the chatbot could process up to 2 million Chinese characters during conversations, up from 200,000 previously. This resulted in an outage last month that lasted for at least two days.

Both Baidu and Alibaba have followed suit.

Search engine giant Baidu said it would update Ernie Bot this month to enable it to process up to 5 million Chinese characters, according to mainland media Chinastarmarket.cn.

Last month, Alibaba announced Tongyi Qianwen was capable of handling texts of around 10 million Chinese characters.

Besides developing in-house large language models, the company has invested in emerging rivals, including Moonshot AI and MiniMax.