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

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.