Tech
Chinese unicorn Moonshot AI updates Kimi chatbot to offer capabilities akin to OpenAI o1
Kimi Chat Explore is touted by Moonshot AI as being able to ‘think and reflect’ in response to user queries
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm Moonshot AIon Friday rolled out the updated version of its conversational chatbot, Kimi Chat, that has improved problem-solving capabilities, akin to the advances shown by the new OpenAI o1 large language model (LLM).
Kimi Chat Explore is touted by Moonshot AI as being able to “think and reflect” in response to user queries and also has an expanded online search capacity, the Beijing-based start-up said in a statement.
The company claims its updated chatbot can now plan and carry out multi-step tasks, recognise mistakes and come up with solutions. Those capabilities are similar to what OpenAI’s o1 LLM provides. LLMs are the technology underpinning generative AI applications like ChatGPT.
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Previewed last month, OpenAI o1 represents a so-called generative pre-trained transformer model, designed “to reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding and maths”, according to the San Francisco-based company.
The landing page of Moonshot AI’s Kimi Chat Explore. Photo: Weibo
Kimi Chat Explore is now capable of searching and analysing more than 500 online pages per query before providing a response. That is 10 times more than the existing 50-page limit of the older Kimi Chat application.
In one example cited by Moonshot AI, Kimi Chat Explore was asked to compare returns from investing in gold and stocks of Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD. Instead of having a user go through various steps to manually collect stock and gold prices, tabulate prices on a spreadsheet and make a calculation to arrive at an answer, the firm’s updated chatbot performed all the relevant tasks itself to come up with a response.
The development of Kimi Chat Explore appears to represent one of the fresh opportunities hinted last month by Moonshot AI founder and chief executive Yang Zhilin after OpenAI o1 was previewed online.
“Going forward, you may see AI capable of performing tasks taking minutes or even hours, switching between different modes with increasingly strong reasoning capabilities,” Yang said at an event last month in the northern port city of Tianjin, near the Chinese capital Beijing. “I believe these are very important trends in the future development of AI.”
That would augur well for the prospects of Moonshot AI’s chatbot efforts.
The company’s earlier-released Kimi Chat was ranked the third-most popular Chinese AI app in September by AIcpb.com, a website that tracks the popularity of AI products worldwide.
Ranked ahead of Kimi Chat in the same period were ByteDance‘s Douban and Baidu‘s Wenxiaoyan, formerly known as Ernie Bot.
After receiving initial major backing from Alibaba Group Holding, Moonshot AI has seen its valuation soar to US$3.3 billion on the back of Tencent Holdings‘ participation in the firm’s recent US$300-million funding round, according to a Bloomberg report in August. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
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