Moonshot AI was founded in April 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua University graduate and Carnegie Mellon University doctorate holder. The company's LLM, which has more than 100 billion parameters, is reportedly more advanced than Amazon-backed Anthropic's AI model, Claude 2. Despite this, the proliferation of LLMs in China has been criticized by Baidu founder Robin Li Yanhong, who believes there are too few AI-native applications based on these models.
Key takeaways:
- Chinese AI start-up Moonshot AI has raised $1 billion in a funding round led by Alibaba and VC HongShan, valuing the company at about $2.5 billion.
- The company's latest product is a smart chatbot called Kimi Chat, which is built on its self-developed Moonshot large language model (LLM) and can process up to 200,000 Chinese characters in a context window.
- The funding round is the largest single financing raised by a Chinese AI start-up since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, indicating strong interest in generative AI start-ups in mainland China.
- Moonshot AI was founded by Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua University graduate who later received his doctoral degree from Carnegie Mellon University in the US.