Tencent is reportedly considering investing in the AI startup Moonshot AI in order to establish a deeper collaboration between WeChat and Moonshot AI’s product, Kimi Intelligent Assistant. Moonshot AI has already raised $1 billion in funding from Alibaba, Ant Group, and other institutions. If this new round of funding is completed, Moonshot AI will become the highest-funded company in the AI field in China and will have investments from both Alibaba and Tencent, two major players in the industry. Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023 and is a key player in the field of large-scale models in China. The company’s CEO, Yang Zhilin, has a strong background in AI research and has worked at Google Brain and FAIR, among other organizations. Moonshot AI has already trained a large-scale proprietary model and has launched its intelligent assistant product, Kimi, which supports text inputs of up to 200,000 Chinese characters. Kimi is designed for tasks such as taking meeting notes, assisting with programming, and writing copy. Moonshot AI is also exploring the integration of multimodal capabilities into its products. In terms of business strategy, the company is focusing on finding a scalable growth model and is considering subscription and revenue-sharing models for its large-scale models. Moonshot AI’s CEO emphasized the importance of models in AI products and the need for trust between humans and AI. The company is also looking into new commercial features to enhance its offerings. Moonshot AI’s team currently consists of over 80 employees, and the company has a valuation of $3 billion.
