The 21st Century Economic Reporter Shen Junhan reports from Beijing
On May 20, there was news in the market that the dark side of the big model company was carrying out the latest round of financing with a valuation of $3 billion. The new investors include Tencent, Gaorong Venture Capital, etc. This means that after investing in MiniMax, Zhipu AI and Baichuan Intelligence, Tencent once again brings a big model unicorn company into its own camp.
Ali's comments on big models are more active and ferocious. Since August last year, Ali has successively invested in Wisdom AI, All Things One, and All Rivers Intelligence. This year, it has invested heavily in the dark side of the month and a new round of financing of MiniMax, bringing together all five big model unicorns in China.
For the latest round of financing, the reporter of 21st Century Economic Report asked the dark side of Yuezhi for confirmation, and the other side said it would not comment.
It is understood that previously, the dark side of the month won early investment from Sequoia China, Today Capital, Zhenge Fund, Lishi Capital and other institutions in 2023.
In February this year, the dark side of the month obtained $1 billion of new financing, breaking the record of the largest single financing in the domestic AI field. After the round of financing, the valuation of the dark side of the month has reached about $2.5 billion. Among them, $800 million came from new shareholders and $200 million from old shareholders. The new shareholders involved in the financing include Alibaba, Xiaohongshu and other Internet enterprises, and the old shareholders Sequoia China, Lishi Capital and others continue to follow the investment.
In addition, it is worth noting that in addition to continuous recognition at the capital level, Kimi, a product of the Dark Side of Yuezhi, also achieved high growth at the market level. According to the latest data of the AI product list (aicpb. com), in April 2024, the website version of Kimi Smart Assistant, a product of the Dark Side of Moon, received 20.4 million visitors, which has surpassed Wenxin's words and ranked first among similar products in China.
Visits of Kimi products in April have exceeded the standard
The dark side of the moon was founded in 2023. In October of that year, the company launched Kimi AI, the world's first intelligent assistant product that supports the input of 200000 Chinese characters. The real popularity of this product was in March this year, and it also led the dark side of the moon into the public view.
On March 18, the dark side of the moon announced on the public account that Kimi intelligent assistant had made another breakthrough in the technology of long context window, and the lossless context length had increased from 200000 words to 2 million words. Since 9:30 a.m. on March 20, Kimi's system traffic has continued to increase abnormally, far exceeding the company's previous expectations.
A person close to the dark side of the month told the 21st Century Business Herald that Kimi's users have indeed grown rapidly. The team has basically just celebrated that the number of users of the product has reached an order of magnitude, and soon after that, the number of users has reached another order of magnitude.
Specifically, in terms of user data, the AI product list (aicpb. com) shows that KimiChat had 3.05 million visits in February, up 107.6% from the previous month, and rose to the third place in the domestic AI product visit list, just behind Baidu Wenxin Yiyan and Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen.
At present, the latest data of the AI product list (aicpb. com) shows that in April 2024, Kimi's smart assistant web page version has reached 20.04 million visitors, up 60.2% over the previous month. The number of visitors has exceeded Wenxin Yiyan, ranking first among similar products in China. In addition, according to QuestMobile data, in March 2024, the monthly active users of Kimi Smart Assistant APP will be 5.897 million, and the monthly active users of Kimi Smart Assistant WeChat applet will exceed 911000.
"Kimi's popularity has attracted many users to start using the product, which has led to a rapid growth in the number of visitors, which may also be one of the reasons for attracting new investors to enter. But what is the user retention after the novelty? This is the focus of attention at this stage, and also tests the technical strength of the dark side of the product." An investor analyzed the 21st Century Economic Report.
In addition to the dark side of the month, MiniMax, Baichuan Intelligent, and Zhipu AI also reported new financing progress this year. In April, market news said that the current valuation of MiniMax had exceeded $2.5 billion.
In addition, some media reported that Baichuan Intelligent will carry out a new round of financing worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which will become one of the largest AI financing in China in 2024. The participating investors confirmed that the valuation of Baichuan Intelligent has exceeded US $1.8 billion (about 13 billion yuan) this year. In response, Baichuan Smart said that it had not officially disclosed the latest financing information, and the amount involved in the report was inaccurate.
Zhipu AI has always been the darling of the capital market. In 2023, it completed a financing of 2.5 billion yuan, and the investment institutions involved include the social security fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund, Meituan, Ant, Ali, Tencent, Xiaomi, Sequoia, Hillhouse, etc.
At the beginning of this year, Zhipu AI received investment from Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. Wang Shaolan, president of Zhipu AI, said in an exclusive interview with reporters from the 21st Century Business Herald at the end of April that financing is a continuous process for large model companies. The company certainly has a new financing plan this year, but the details are not convenient to disclose.
Technology giants compete for big model unicorns
In the era of mobile Internet, once a startup company accepts the investment of Tencent and Ali, it will be regarded as a "standing in line". Looking at the investment territory of hundreds of enterprises in Alibaba and Tencent respectively, only a few start-ups can obtain simultaneous investment from both.
The last track that made Tencent Ali's two giants bet at the same time was UGC. They jointly invested in Little Red Book, Station B and Zhihu. Station B and Zhihu have been listed, and the valuation of Little Red Book will be as high as 20 billion dollars in the final round of financing in 2021.
Now in the AI big model track, the movements of the two giants are more similar. On the one hand, big models burn money crazily and don't know when they will make profits. On the other hand, they have launched their own big models. Why do Tencent and Ali rush to bring big model unicorns into their own camp?
One of the main driving forces is that the rapid development of AI big model has led to a surge in computing demand of cloud providers, and also brought huge new business growth space for computing vendors. According to the latest data of Synergy Research Group, Amazon, Microsoft and Google will occupy 66% of the global market share in Q4 2023. According to the data released by Canalys, a market research organization, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud will continue to dominate the Chinese cloud service market in the fourth quarter of 2023.
It can be seen that the most active giants of big model investment are the top cloud computing suppliers in the domestic and foreign markets. A16Z, a well-known venture capital in Silicon Valley, estimates that large model application layer manufacturers spend about 20% - 40% of their revenue on reasoning and model tuning, and this revenue is usually directly paid to cloud manufacturers or third-party model providers. And third-party model providers also spend about half of their revenue on cloud infrastructure, so 10% - 20% of the total revenue of generative AI eventually flows to cloud providers.
An investor analyzed to the reporter, "For technology giants, attracting a leading large model enterprise to their own cloud through investment can bring real growth to the business at the moment. At this stage, it is more certain to become the infrastructure of the large model first rather than to roll out the large model that can't see when it will be profitable."
