Moonshot AI's Kimi Chatbot, China's Answer to ChatGPT, Offers Premium Service for Mass Users
May 20, 2024 - Moonshot AI's Kimi Chatbot has started charging fees in return for faster responses, joining a growing list of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) companies testing the waters of profiting from mass users. The chatbot, also known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian, launched the new features to offer users faster responses, Chinese media Jiemian News reported on Sunday.
The New Features and Pricing
Beijing-based Moonshot AI is offering six tiers of "top-up" plans, ranging from 5.2 yuan (US$0.72) for four days to 399 yuan for a year of "priority use", according to screenshots shared by its users on China's social media platform Weibo.
Background
Kimi Chatbot, launched last October and powered by Moonshot AI's self-developed Kimi large language model (LLM), has been seen as China's answer to ChatGPT from Microsoft-backed start-up OpenAI. LLMs are the technology used to train generative AI services like ChatGPT. In March, Kimi Chatbot claimed it could process up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, a major upgrade from a previous version that could only handle 200,000.
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparison with Ernie Bot and Other LLMs
From last November, Baidu's Ernie Bot 4.0, a Chinese search engine giant, became the first to charge for public use, charging 59.9 yuan a month for a single-month membership for Ernie Bot 4.0. Other LLMs, such as ByteDance's Doubao LLM, Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen-72b-chat LLM, and ZhiPu AI's GLM-4 LLM, are charging various fees per 1,000 tokens.
Conclusion
Kimi Chatbot has started charging fees for mass users, joining a growing list of Chinese AI companies testing the waters of profiting from consumers. The move could indicate a shift towards commercialization in the Chinese AI industry, as more companies seek to generate revenue from their LLMs and AI services.
