Recently, Alibaba Cloud announced partnerships with Moonshot AI and Zhaopin Group. Yang Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI, and Zhang Yuejia, CEO of Zhaopin Group, have become the two new "ambassadors" for Alibaba Cloud.

Public information reveals that Alibaba Cloud's computing power and large model service platform will help Moonshot AI enhance model inference efficiency, accelerating advancements for the Kimi AI assistant. Similarly, Zhaopin Group's large model applications will leverage Alibaba Cloud for rapid deployment and online support.

This collaboration marks not only the first public partnership between Moonshot AI and Alibaba Cloud, but also Alibaba's second significant cooperation with Moonshot AI following their investment disclosed in financial reports.

Kimi "Hugging" Alibaba

In October 2023, Kimi gained attention with its "long-text" feature capable of handling 200,000 words of context. In March this year, Kimi achieved a tenfold upgrade, supporting up to 2 million words of lossless input, approximately 4 million tokens, setting a global record for the longest context window. This achievement owes much to its deep collaboration with Alibaba Cloud.

As an AI startup, Moonshot AI faces substantial human and time costs in digging into computing power, model adjustments, tool frameworks, model services, and application development from scratch. Moreover, without the elastic container products of public clouds and relief from multi-regional node networks during traffic surges, it risks missing market opportunities.

Moreover, achieving the "Scale Effect" on the internet is challenging in the large model market. More new users and more frequent input/output requests from users demand greater computing power costs, posing Kimi's most significant challenge.

As one of the few companies globally with both AI capabilities and cloud computing business, Alibaba Cloud set its strategic focus in 2023 on "AI-driven, Cloud-first" operations, announcing increased investment in research and development, from basic computing power to AI platforms and model services, for comprehensive technological upgrades and innovations.

In the same year, Alibaba Cloud declared its goal to create the most open cloud for the AI era, upgrading and innovating across its stack from basic computing power to AI platforms and model services. In June this year, Alibaba Cloud launched Qwen2, the world's most powerful open-source model, surpassing numerous domestic closed-source models.

With its independently developed Feitian cloud computing operating system, Alibaba Cloud's "IaaS+PaaS+MaaS" full-stack structure provides high-performance, cost-effective computing resources for enterprises, alongside tools for large model training, fine-tuning, and inference. Thus, Kimi benefits from inexhaustible support.

Alibaba "Spoiling" LLMs

Since proposing its development strategy of "User first, AI-driven," Alibaba Cloud has not only developed large models internally but also invested in leading large model enterprises within the AI industry.

Reportedly, Alibaba Cloud has invested in the top five valued "unicorns" in the AI industry, including Intellispectrum AI (approximately ¥1.64 billion), 01Ventures (undisclosed), Bai Chuan Intelligence ($300 million), MiniMax (over $600 million), and Moonshot AI. As disclosed in the annual report in May this year, Alibaba invested approximately $800 million in Moonshot AI during the 2024 fiscal year, acquiring about 36% of its equity.