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The expanded length of Chinese-character prompts that can be handled by Moonshot AI’s Kimi chatbot burnishes the already lofty credentials of the tech unicorn. Image: Shutterstock
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Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI claims breakthrough in expanded Chinese-character prompt for Kimi chatbot

  • Moonshot AI’s updated Kimi chatbot can handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, up from the previous 200,000 characters
  • Company founder Yang Zhilin has said that the ability to process long prompts is critical to the future development of AI models
Artificial intelligence
Ben Jiang
Ben Jiangin Beijing
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Chinese artificial intelligence company Moonshot AI claims that its Kimi chatbot can now handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt – the instruction or query a user enters into the interface of a ChatGPT-like service – to surpass the capabilities of existing home-grown AI tools.
The Beijing-based start-up, known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian, said this feature on its updated Kimi chatbot is currently in beta testing that is limited to invited users before a wider roll-out, the company said in a statement on Monday. Launched last October, the chatbot was built on the firm’s self-developed Kimi large language model (LLM).

Previously, the Kimi chatbot could handle as many as 200,000 Chinese characters in a context window – referring to the swathe of text that an AI model can process during conversation with users.

“We believe that the exponential expansion of the size of an LLM’s context window will help unleash users’ imagination for various AI applications,” Moonshot AI engineering vice-president Xu Xinran said in the statement.

Such applications could include the “understanding and analysis of a complete code repository, an intelligent agent that autonomously performs multi-step tasks to multimodal models”.

Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin. Photo: Weibo
LLMs are the technology used to train ChatGPT and similar generative AI services, which are used to create new content including audio, code, images, text, simulations and videos.

Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin told an industry event last year that the ability to process long prompts is critical to the future development of AI models.

With Kimi’s updated feature, Moonshot AI has surpassed the prompt capacity of Baichuan, a company established by Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan. Last October, the Baichuan2-192k LLM was touted as being capable of handling around 350,000 Chinese characters in a context window.
The expanded length of Chinese-character prompts on Kimi burnishes the already lofty credentials of Moonshot AI, which recorded the largest single financing raised by a Chinese AI start-up since OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022.

Chinese start-up Moonshot AI raises US$1 billion in funding round led by Alibaba

Moonshot AI last month raised more than US$1 billion in a new funding round led by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and venture capital firm HongShan. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The tech unicorn was valued at about US$2.5 billion in its latest funding round, according to separate reports published last month by local media 36Kr and LatePost.

HongShan, the Chinese spin-off of US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, and angel investor ZhenFund were involved in Moonshot AI’s seed funding last June, according to market intelligence platform PitchBook.
At an event on Monday, Moonshot AI showcased various tasks made possible by Kimi’s expanded prompt capacity. The chatbot would be able to give medical consultation after perusing a Chinese medicine handbook, or even provide stock market advice on Nvidia based on years of financial reports by the AI chip giant.
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