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Recently, according to media reports, the domestic large-scale model unicorn Dark Side of the Moon completed its latest round of financing of over US$300 million, and Tencent participated in this round of financing. At the same time, this round of financing also pushed the valuation of Dark Side of the Moon to a high of US$3.3 billion, which may make it the highest valued among the "New Six AI Dragons" in China. On August 6, Dark Side of the Moon and Tencent both told the reporter of "Daily Economic News" that they would not comment on the above news.

The technological war needs funds to pave the way. The computing power and talents of the big models at this stage cannot be separated from the support of funds. The Dark Side of the Moon said in an interview with the reporter of the Daily Economic News that the current team size is less than 150 people, while this indicator was 80 people at the end of February this year.

After receiving a large amount of financial support, does Dark Side of the Moon have a certain ability to "generate revenue"? Regarding the "reward function" attempt in May this year, Dark Side of the Moon said that the reward function is a small exploration, and the company will gradually begin to explore the commercialization of Kimi, but the current focus is still on building a more powerful next-generation model. At the same time, Dark Side of the Moon revealed that Kimi has been exploring multimodal models and looks forward to sharing the progress with everyone this year.

Valuation temporarily leads the "Six Little Dragons"

The financing news in late May came true in less than three months. Recently, according to media reports, the domestic large-scale model unicorn Moon's Dark Side completed the latest round of financing of over US$300 million. New investors in this round of financing include Tencent, Gaorong Venture Capital, etc.

In this round of AI wave, Dark Side of the Moon has won multiple rounds of financing in less than a year and a half since its establishment, with star capitals and Internet giants competing for investment.

Tianyancha shows that Dark Side of the Moon received its first angel round of financing of over US$200 million in June 2023, with investors including Zhen Fund and Sequoia China. At that time, the company was valued at US$300 million. In July of the same year, the company received round A financing from Meituan Longzhu, BlueRun Ventures and others. In February this year, Dark Side of the Moon received round A+ financing of over US$1 billion, with investors including Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Alibaba and others.

This round of financing in February is also the largest single round of financing obtained by a Chinese large model startup company since the emergence of ChatGPT, which also made Dark Side of the Moon's valuation jump to US$2.5 billion.

According to the latest reports, the current valuation of Dark Side of the Moon is as high as 3.3 billion US dollars. This also means that in less than half a year, the valuation of Dark Side of the Moon has increased by 32%. Based on this calculation, among the six AI "little dragons" consisting of Zero One Everything, MimiMax, Baichuan Intelligence, Zhipu AI, Step Star, and Dark Side of the Moon, Dark Side of the Moon is currently ranked first in valuation, followed by Zhipu AI, which is rumored to be valued at 3 billion US dollars.

In the past three months, Dark Side of the Moon has launched several new products.

On July 8, the official WeChat account of Dark Side of the Moon announced that Kimi has launched a browser plug-in, which currently has two functions: "Question Pen" and "Summarizer". The official introduction of Dark Side of the Moon said that the plug-in supports lightweight search functions and is suitable for application scenarios such as browsing web terms query, reporting article summaries, providing writing inspiration, and document data query.

On August 2, Dark Side of the Moon released Kimi's enterprise-level API (application programming interface), which is mainly aimed at enterprises with a certain scale of business and provides API services for large corporate customers with higher requirements for stability. This is also a key signal that Kimi has changed from focusing on to C applications to also taking into account to B business.

Big model "money-burning war" upgrades

Big models are a field that is extremely capital-intensive. The latest financial reports released by technology giants such as Microsoft and Google show that their investment in artificial intelligence continues to increase. Microsoft's financial report released on July 31, Beijing time, showed that as of June 30, the company's capital expenditure in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 was as high as US$19 billion, a year-on-year increase of 77.6%, of which cloud computing and artificial intelligence-related expenditures accounted for the vast majority.

In July this year, Dario Amodei, CEO and president of Anthropic, OpenAI's number one competitor, also revealed that the training cost of the AI ​​model currently being developed by the company is as high as $1 billion.

"Everyone believes that big models will be the foundation of future AI and will have a strong scale effect, so everyone wants to invest in this direction. But this (big model) field requires too much money and it is impossible to disperse it, so it can only be concentrated at the top." Wang Sheng, partner of Inno Angel Fund, said in an interview with a reporter from the "Daily Economic News".

Among the six AI companies with a valuation of over $1 billion in China, Tencent has invested in four, while Alibaba has invested in the other five except Step Star. In June this year, Quantum位 reported that Step Star was raising a new round of financing with a valuation of $2 billion, and Alibaba was also among the investors.

"Whether capital support can be sustained and whether it can effectively cope with fierce market competition is crucial in determining whether large model companies can become leading enterprises." Digital economist Liu Xingliang told the "Daily Economic News" reporter that at the same time, the commercialization capabilities and market share of large model companies also determine the sustainability of their long-term development.

At an offline closed-door meeting in May this year, Yang Zhilin, founder of Dark Side of the Moon, said that commercialization will determine how many users a product can attract. Sometimes the product is not necessarily the bottleneck. The key is to find a scalable way of growth. Some great business innovations may emerge here.

However, a clear path may not necessarily work. The large model is still in a high-investment development stage, and stable profits are far from a goal that can be easily achieved at the moment.

Take OpenAI as an example. In July this year, foreign media quoted insiders and undisclosed internal financial data analysis, saying that OpenAI may face a huge loss of up to US$5 billion this year. The company's annual revenue is estimated to be US$3.5 billion to US$4.5 billion, far lower than its operating costs.

In May this year, Kimi also began to try commercialization and launched a reward function. Users can purchase gifts ranging from 5.20 yuan to 399 yuan to obtain different peak-time priority usage time.

In this regard, Dark Side of the Moon said in an interview with the "Daily Economic News" reporter that the company will gradually begin to explore the commercialization of Kimi, but the current focus is still on creating a more powerful next-generation model.

However, the market is bound to have expectations for the investment of "real money". Maybe Dark Side of the Moon, with a "full pocket", does not need to worry about making money now, but one day, investors will demand the returns they want.

Daily Economic News