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Author: Zhang Yifan

Editor: Shen Siqi

Source: Hard AI

In the first half of 2024, new and old AI players saw a wave of growth in traffic under the leadership of Kimi's traffic.In just 6 months, the total number of visits to the "AI Five Little Dragons" soared by 963%。

According to the statistics of web page access data of various companies compiled by Similarweb, in June 2024, Kimi's monthly visits reached 20 million times, which was the most outstanding among the "AI Five Little Dragons" and ahead of other companies. It was followed by Zhipu AI, with nearly 3.5 million monthly visits. Conch AI (MiniMax) also performed well, with monthly visits reaching about 600,000 times. Baixiaoying (Baichuan Intelligence) and Wanzhi (Zero One Everything) ranked fourth, with monthly visits of about 200,000 times each.

Bai Xiaoying and Wanzhi were officially launched in May 2024. They are currently in a stage of rapid user growth and their traffic is still in the climbing stage.

From January to June 2024, the total page visits of the AI ​​5 Little Dragons soared from 2.42 million to 25.74 million, an increase of 963%. However, the page visit data of each company slowed down in June, which may also be related to the coming of summer vacation.

New changes also occurred in major AI companies in June. Baidu Wenxin, Ali Tongyi and Douyin Doubao all maintained millions of monthly visits on the web.

Among them, Baidu Wenxin performed the best, reaching 16 million visits. Ali Tongyi has also continued to grow in the past five months and is about to break the milestone of 10 million monthly visits. Tencent Yuanbao is particularly worth mentioning. After its launch in May, it showed an amazing growth rate in June, with a growth rate of 1040% to 559,000 visits.

Globally, ChatGPT still maintains an absolute advantage, with nearly 1.8 billion page visits in June. Although Claude ranks second, there is a large gap between it and ChatGPT, with approximately 47.49 million page visits in June.

1. Monthly visit data of each manufacturer (web page)

In general, the growth data of all companies slowed down in June, and the common reason may be related to the summer vacation. However, the difference between the data of each company may be related to the change of product advertising strategy.

* Data is as of the end of June 2024. The visit volume analysis in this article is based on web page data.

1、Kimi

According to Similarweb statistics, Kimi's monthly visits in June reached 21.4 million, a 1% decrease from the previous month, marking the first month-on-month decline in six months.

The reason for this situation may be related to Kimi's advertising strategy. According to AppGrowing's data analysis, Kimi conducted a large-scale KOC advertising campaign from March to April this year, and the viral spread brought a significant increase in web page visits. However, in May, Kimi's advertising volume shrank, and the form of advertising also changed (turning to APP), which affected the web page visits.

2. Zhipu Qingyan

According to Similarweb data, the monthly visits to Zhipu Qingyan reached 3.35 million in June. From a six-month perspective, the visits have generally shown an upward trend, but the number of web page visits in June still fell by a small double-digit percentage month-on-month.

According to AppGrowing data, Zhipu Qingyan's investment traffic increased in June.

According to relevant news statistics, Zhipu released multiple product updates in June, including version 2.0 of the MaaS platform open platform, and upgraded its ChatGLM-3-6B model and launched the GLM-4-9B series.

According to the official introduction, GLM-4-9B has significantly upgraded its capabilities in various aspects, including multi-language, multi-modality, and reasoning performance. For example, the context processing of GLM-4-9B has been increased from 128K to 1M tokens, and it can process 2 million words of text at the same time, which is about the same as two volumes of Dream of the Red Chamber.

In addition, the function calling capability of GLM-4-9B has made a huge leap, increasing by 40% compared to the previous generation. In some tests, the function calling capability of GLM-4-9B is comparable to that of GPT-4.

3. Bai Xiaoying

According to Similarweb data, Baichuan Intelligence has seen a significant increase in visits after launching its AI smart assistant Bai Xiaoying in May 2024. After only two months of launch, the monthly visits reached 240,000, a month-on-month increase of 60%.

4. Wanzhi

According to Similarweb data, Zero One Everything received 270,000 visits after launching its AI work platform Wanzhi in May 2024. In the following June, the number of visits fell by 34.93% month-on-month to 177,000.

In June, Zero One Wanwu reached a close cooperation with Alibaba Cloud and landed on Alibaba Cloud Bailian Platform, the largest AI cloud service platform in China, providing API services through a cloud vendor for the first time.

5. Conch AI

According to Similarweb data, in June, the monthly visits to Conch AI reached 574,000, but this figure was down 10% from the previous month.

However, another popular companion AI product "Xingye" under Minimax has shown a good upward trend in the past six months. According to Qimai data, the average daily download volume of Xingye on iOS devices (including iPhone and iPad) has reached 11,000 times.

6. Literary Mind

According to Similarweb data, in June, Wenxinyiyan's monthly page visits were 16.14 million, a 7% decrease from the previous month. In the past three months, the overall monthly page visits have remained stable at around 16 million.

According to AppGrowing data, Wenxin's concentrated investment in the past year was mainly from December 2023 to January 2024. The company previously disclosed that the number of Wenxin Yiyan users reached 100 million at the end of December 2023. With the iteration of products and the launch of new features, the data from March to May has increased for three consecutive months.

In terms of new products, on June 28, Baidu released Wenxin Big Model 4.0 Turbo, and announced that the web version, APP, and API will also be gradually opened to users.

7. Thousand Questions on Tongyi

According to Similarweb data, in June, Tongyi Qianwen received 7.579 million web page visits, a 3% increase from the previous month, marking the fifth consecutive month of increased visits.

8. Tencent Yuanbao

According to Similarweb data, Tencent Yuanbao has grown rapidly since its launch in May. Less than two months after its launch, the number of visits reached 559,000, a month-on-month increase of 1041%.

With the launch of Yuanbao, Tencent's investment traffic is also growing. According to AppGrowing data, it increased by 2215% month-on-month in June.

In terms of products, Tencent Yuanbao further upgraded its AI search and analysis capabilities in June, and its performance was once again improved. This update broadened the context length of Yuanbao input, supporting the processing of ultra-long texts of 10 million words. The unique WeChat public account data also gave Yuanbao a differentiated competitive feature.

9. Bean curd

According to Similarweb data, Doubao's page visits in June set a new record again, climbing to 5.7 million, a month-on-month increase of 22%. It is worth noting that this is Doubao's fifth consecutive month of month-on-month growth.

This is closely related to Doubao's traffic strategy. AppGrowing data shows that Doubao has significantly increased its advertising investment in the past two months. In particular, in June, Doubao's advertising investment reached 130 million yuan, a surge of 729% from the previous month. This scale of traffic investment also broke the record previously set by Kimi.

10、Claude

According to Similarweb data, Claude's visits declined slightly in June, down 1% from the previous month, and remained stable at around 47 million.

11、ChatGPT

According to Similarweb data, in June, ChatGPT visits rebounded from May, increasing by 11% month-on-month to 1.8 billion.

2. Factors affecting visit volume

There are many reasons for the gap in visit volume, such as first-mover advantage, frequency of advertising, multimodal support, product matrix, etc.

Taking the AI ​​5 Little Dragons as an example, from the perspective of launch time, although the first-mover advantage exists, it does not constitute a moat. For example, Kimi was launched later, but has the highest page visits.

From the perspective of the modes supported by the model, Zhipu AI supports multi-modal generation of text and pictures, while other companies have not yet launched related functions. In order to achieve differentiated advantages, each company has also taken different routes. Kimi focuses on long text processing, Zero One Everything focuses on a one-click work platform (such as one-click generation of PPT), and MiniMax has launched a voice question and answer function. In general, in terms of multi-modality, the overall gap between the companies is not large.

From the perspective of product matrix, Zhipu has a more complete product matrix, having launched nearly 10 AI products, followed by Zero One Everything, Dark Side of the Moon, Baichuan Intelligence, and Minimax.

From the perspective of advertising, according to AppGrowing data, Zhipu AI started advertising as early as August 2023, and Kimi started in March 2024. In the past six months, Kimi has had the strongest advertising efforts and the fastest growth in visits.

In addition, Hard AI sorted out the data of Doubao and Kimi's advertising and user growth, and found that in the short term, advertising was positively correlated with user visits. However, due to changes in the advertising strategies of various manufacturers, especially the shift to APP-side customer acquisition, the relevant statistics have differed in the past two months. However, unlike traditional mobile Internet manufacturers, the main usage scenario of large model users is still PC web pages. Even ChatGPT, which has the highest proportion of app users, accounts for no more than 1/5.

In general, in the absence of significant differences in technology levels among companies, first-mover advantage and advertising traffic are the main means of customer growth.

3. Startups and large companies

Compared with AI start-ups, large companies have natural advantages in capital and user traffic.

At present, two major camps have been formed in China's generative AI field: one is the "big models" established by traditional Internet giants, such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and other companies; the other is big model startups, such as Zhipu AI, MiniMax, Dark Side of the Moon, Baichuan Intelligence, Zero One Everything, etc.

Hard AI counted the monthly visits to the models of large companies at home and abroad and found that the user traffic of large companies is better than that of start-ups. With their funds and user base, large companies still have huge competitive (money-burning) advantages when the capabilities of their models are limited.

However, AI is still an industry that needs continuous innovation and support. Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Baichuan Intelligence, said: "Small innovations rely on large companies, and big innovations rely on small companies." Although large companies have more computing power, funds and resources, innovative breakthroughs rely more on organizational efficiency, which large companies do not have, such as layers of approval and restrictions. Startups have huge room to play in this regard.

In general, large companies have advantages in terms of capital and user base, and the large models they launch are more prominent in terms of influence and user acquisition. Startups have unique advantages in terms of innovation and breakthroughs. The domestic AI industry landscape is expected to continue to change.

(Note: Third-party data may differ from actual data)