Why it matters: The quadrupling of Kimi’s visit count in March meant the ChatGPT-like tool surpassed Alibaba’s competitor Tongyi Qianwen. Details: Moonshot focuses on longer textual inputs and outputs, a new battlefield for Chinese LLM companies. Less than 72 hours after Kimi claimed a technological breakthrough in handling 2 million Chinese characters, the chatbot experienced a service outage. In a recent interview with Tencent Technology, Moonshot founder Yang Zhilin noted that a focus on long texts was decided upon at the company’s inception. Context: Moonshot AI reportedly raised over $1 billion in funding earlier this year from existing shareholders such as Alibaba, Sequoia China, and Xiaohongshu, marking the largest single-round financing for a Chinese AI big model company to date.