Every reporter | Yang Xinyi Every editor | Yang Xia
"If Kimi can’t find the information, it is difficult for users with high probability to find it by themselves through traditional search engines." On October 11th, the day when Kimi Exploratory Edition was released, its product director described the improvement of product search ability intuitively.
On October 11th, the Dark Side of the Moon announced the launch of an exploratory version of Kimi with AI autonomous search capability. According to the official introduction, the search volume of the Kimi Exploratory Edition is 10 times that of the regular edition, and more than 500 pages can be intensively read in one search.
In an interview with national business daily, the dark side of the moon said that compared with AI search products that only summarize a small number of search results and get an aggregated page, Kimi adopted a different idea. "We think that AI should be allowed to search independently, on the one hand, give full play to the advantages of machines, do exhaustive queries, and search and read hundreds of pages at a time; On the other hand, to give full play to the intelligence of AI, AI can do full planning and problem disassembly, know what to search for, and reflect on the results that have been searched to improve the quality of search. "
What is the "moat" of AI search products at this stage? An AI search technician told national business daily that the main competition at present lies in technology, mainly the design and implementation of reasoning framework. "The accuracy of AI generated answers is related to the search magnitude, but it also depends on the model alignment, summary ability and search resources."
The emergence of Kimi Exploratory Edition is also one of the footnotes for search to move towards a new era — — After several rounds of financing, the AI search engine startup Perplexity has become a "upstart in Silicon Valley", and domestic AI search players such as Baidu, Quark, Kimi and Secret Tower are also vying for the opportunity to "dominate" search in the new era.
However, according to Warren Wang, a partner of Innolux Angel Fund, the current user group of AI search products "is only a small part of the existing search engine users", and its liquidity will be affected, "the advertising model will not have an advantage over traditional search engines". Dark of the Moon revealed to the reporter of national business daily that the Exploratory Edition does have a higher cost. At present, it is limited to five times per person per day, and it will be considered to be commercialized in the future.
The term "Kimi collapsed" once again appeared in Weibo Hot Search.
Regarding the failure caused by a large number of visits after the release of the Exploratory Edition, the official Weibo "Kimi Intelligent Assistant" responded on the afternoon of the 11th that the product has been resumed, and it is expected that the Exploratory Edition will be open to all users before October 14th. "In order to let everyone experience the Exploratory Edition as early as possible, colleagues have been working overtime on National Day. As a result, they just started to increase the volume today, but they still failed to catch everyone’s enthusiasm."
On the dark side of the moon, I told national business daily that Kimi’s ordinary search can read up to 50 pages at a time, and the search volume of the exploratory version is 10 times that of the ordinary version, and it can read more than 500 pages at a time.
Li Qiang, CEO of Jingjing Technology, said in an interview with national business daily that at present, the mainstream AI search engines in China usually have no more than 50 searches, or even only a dozen, and the increase in search volume will usually improve the accuracy of the answers. "The search volume is not the only decisive factor, but the quality of the underlying data and the processing ability of the AI model are also very important."
"At this stage, the competitive point of AI search products is Post-training." An AI search technician pointed out in an interview with national business daily that "in terms of reasoning, at present, everyone’s choices are to be an AI Agent or Post-training similar to GPT-o1 model, and the current AI search products basically choose the former route."
In this regard, the dark side of the moon responded to the reporter of national business daily, saying that the research and development of Kimi Exploratory Edition can be considered as a combination of the above two paths — — "Kimi Exploratory Edition is based on an initial insight of the model development team, that is, a longer and more sophisticated reasoning and thinking process will help the model to output more comprehensive and accurate results."
"AI Agent means that AI can have more autonomous behavior and help users do more things." According to the dark side of the moon, Kimi Exploratory Edition has the ability of AI autonomous search, which can simulate the reasoning and thinking process of human beings, decompose complex problems at multiple levels, perform in-depth search, immediately reflect on the improvement results, provide more comprehensive and accurate answers, and help users complete complex tasks such as analysis and research more efficiently.
The reporter of national business daily tested Kimi Exploratory Edition, Perplexity Pro, Bean Bag and Wen Xiaoyan respectively on the question "According to the financial report, the single-quarter revenue growth data of a company from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2024". The test results show that the data and calculation results called by Kimi Exploratory Edition are the only ones that are completely accurate, but it takes a long time to generate an answer.
The dark side of the moon revealed that in the internal performance evaluation test, Kimi’s performance evaluation team compared all domestic mainstream AI assistants and search products, including paid and professional versions, in combination with more than 1,000 real and long-standing questions from users, and Kimi’s exploratory version had comprehensive advantages in accuracy and completeness, and its comprehensive performance exceeded that of similar products by at least 30%.
How do AI search products build their own barriers when there are hundreds of battles?
In Li Qiang’s view, the Kimi Exploratory Edition has more advantages in solving complex problems by disassembling problems, searching and reasoning step by step, and adding retrospective reflection mechanism. This is a popular trend at present, which is similar to GPT-o1 model.
Therefore, the core competitive points of current AI search products mainly lie in data quality and quantity, user experience, technological innovation, one-stop service and business model.
"In the noise of information overload, a platform is needed to provide users with accurate answers, especially in an era when time is so precious." Aravind Srinivas, the founder of Perplexity, has publicly expressed the original intention of the company and its optimism about the prospect of AI search.
In the first half of this year, Perplexity received several rounds of large-scale financing, one of which was as high as $250 million, and the company’s valuation has increased from $1 billion in April this year to $3 billion.
Dmitry Shevelenko, the company’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview with the media in August this year that its AI search engine handled about 250 million questions in July this year, which is 50% of the total number of responses in 2023. NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun, Amazon founder Bezos and other industry celebrities have repeatedly publicly stated that they are loyal users of Perplexity.
Such a high-speed growth is not difficult to explain the ambitions of domestic players in AI search.
In June this year, Zhihu released the AI search product "Zhihu Direct Answer"; In August of this year, Quark, a subsidiary of Ali Intelligent Information Business Group, released a new PC terminal, and comprehensively upgraded AI search and other functions; At the earnings conference call in the second quarter of this year, Li Yanhong, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, revealed that 18% of Baidu’s search results were generated by AI.
The dark side of the moon told national business daily that AI search is still in a very early stage. "Compared with the results of traditional search, if you give 10 website links per page, AI search summarizes and aggregates the content and can generate an aggregated page. At present, it seems that such AI search has not brought great subversion to traditional search. "
The person in charge of Kimi Exploratory Edition products believes that in the future, search engines will become a tool that AI is better at calling. People only need to focus on asking good questions, and AI can combine the capabilities of the model itself to search independently and massively in the huge Internet, constantly reflect on iterations, and more accurately locate the required answers.
In terms of cost and commercialization, Moonlight revealed to the reporter of national business daily that the Exploratory Edition does have a higher cost. At present, it is limited to five times per person per day, and some commercialization attempts will be considered in the future.
"The biggest business model of search engines is advertising. (AI search products) will launch a subscription system for people with strong knowledge needs. In this case, the advertising model will not have an advantage over traditional search engines, and it may get worse. "
Warren Wang, a partner of Innolux Angel Fund, told the national business daily that he thought that AI search products should not rely on advertising to make profits, but should rely on users to pay. "It is very difficult to do this in China.".
In September this year, according to media reports, Perplexity is planning a new advertising model for its artificial intelligence search engine. Perplexity hopes to completely reform Google’s first auction advertising system, in which the company obtains sponsored links for queries through bidding.
It can be observed that in August this year, the dark side of the moon completed the latest round of financing exceeding $300 million, which also pushed the valuation of the dark side of the moon to a high of $3.3 billion.
In May this year, the dark side of the moon began to test the commercialization of water. Users can "reward" Kimi by paying, and the amount ranges from 5.20 yuan to 399 yuan. Each file corresponds to different peak hours of priority use.
In this regard, the dark side of the moon said in an interview with national business daily in August that the company will gradually start to explore the commercialization of Kimi, but the current focus is to build the next generation model with stronger capabilities.