How Kimi, Ernie are heating up China’s AI rivalry as Alibaba, Baidu lock horns

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When it comes to generative AI, the US stole a march on China, thanks to innovations by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and others. It may have started on the backfoot but China is getting in to the AI groove. According to a report by South China Morning Post, the generative AI chatbot market is growing rapidly.

Moonshot AI’s chatbot Kimi has reportedly seen its website and app traffic quadruple in March. According to data shared by AIcpb.com with the publication, Kimi’s views reached 12.5 million. Moonshot AI is backed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba. The surge in numbers has made Kimi the second most popular chatbot in China, behind Baidu’s Ernie Bot.

However, those numbers pale in comparison to how big ChatGPT is. As per the data, OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT  had a staggering 1.86 billion views in March. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not accessible in China and neither is Google Gemini AI. Domestic tech giants are competing hard to make a dent in the generative AI space, which has caught the fancy of almost every big tech company. Baidu’s Ernie Bot is the market leader in China and its user base is growing.

Experts quoted in the report believe Kimi's focus on specific tasks, like analysing long text, is a key factor in its success.

A recent report suggested that Kimi’s popularity caused a temporary outage as too many visitors bombarded it with questions. The outage led to Moonshot increaseing its capacity tenfold enabling it to process up to 2 million characters in conversation.

Baidu reportedly has plans to upgrade Ernie Bot to handle 5 million characters. Alibaba has another in-house chatbot — Tongyi Qianwen  — which can claim to manage texts of around 10 million characters.

Moonshot AI is a startup that is heavily backed by Alibaba and is focusing on in house generative AI models and chatbots as well. The other AI startup which Alibaba has invested in is Minimax.