Moonshot AI’s Kimi Chatbot, China’s answer to ChatGPT, offers premium service for mass users
- The Beijing-based company is offering six tiers of ‘top-up’ plans, ranging from 5.2 yuan for four days to 399 yuan for a year of ‘priority use’
- In March, it claimed to be able to process up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, up from 200,000 in a previous version
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.
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.
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.
However, as user numbers surged over a short period, technical glitches resulted from an overwhelming number of prompts. On March 21, the Kimi app and website crashed for hours, due to “overload” issues, according to local media reports.
