Moonshot AI Has No Dreams

"Onward, into the endless and unknown ice cream 🍦"

"AI products launch daily, foundation models update monthly. Benchmarks and slide decks everywhere, invite codes and agents flying in tandem. Yet no one cares except AI content creators.

And does anyone still remember, before Hangzhou's Six Little Dragons, the previous generation's gods were the AI Six Little Tigers 😭

In light of this, I declare this week Emo Savage Review Week. Going through the AI Six Little Tigers one by one, keeping it real.

One piece per day. Today is Moonshot AI, tomorrow is Zhipu AI."

Moonshot AI's recent move is building agents.

Yang, once the undisputed leader, now can't even keep up with the trends while they're still hot 😭

Before that, Moonshot AI also tried community building. A foundation model company, with its core business clearly lagging competitors and user growth hitting a wall, keeps launching new businesses one after another.

Like Chuan Wang doing medical foundation models — the main business isn't figured out, trying to achieve so-called "overtaking on the bend" through vertical applications.

Moonshot AI is an old story of FOMO, money, and desire intertwined.

Looking back, "FOMO" runs through Moonshot AI's entire history: rising to become a $3 billion unicorn because of FOMO; failing to properly handle terms with old shareholders because of FOMO; trying to replicate mobile internet's blood-burning user acquisition because of FOMO — ultimately getting devoured by FOMO in return.

At this moment two years ago, Saint Yang burst onto the scene with the "genius prodigy" persona: Carnegie Mellon PhD, firm believer in AGI, choosing from the start what seemed at the time a rather forward-looking entry point — Long Context, long-text processing.

Yang compared long context to "new computer memory" for AI, seeing it as key to achieving personalized AGI interaction, "the first step toward the moon."

Less than a year after founding, the company completed two funding rounds in 2023, totaling nearly 2 billion RMB.

What truly pushed FOMO sentiment to its peak was Alibaba's entry. In early 2024, Alibaba bet nearly $800 million on Moonshot AI, sending its valuation soaring to $3 billion.

Thus, catalyzed by FOMO sentiment, the beloved Moonshot AI took center stage.

But inexplicably, Moonshot AI began massive user acquisition spending, having interns shoot sweet romance short dramas, fighting Salted Fish King for user retention, turning foundation models into digital pickled vegetables.

To this day, no one knows who chose this acquisition strategy. The spending decision was too investor-brained, too mobile internet. This cost-be-damned approach to user growth reminds me of the ofo bike deployment back in the day — behind both was GSR Ventures.

Supporting this aggressive strategy was the entire investment circle's faith in the "flywheel effect" and "Scaling Law."

Moonshot AI's early investors loved preaching the so-called "data flywheel" theory — more users generate more data, which makes the model stronger; as late as last year, Yang himself believed that instead of training with static datasets, new approaches to scaling were needed.

In November 2024, the tech world completely shifted direction. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and other top AI scientists publicly questioned the limitations of Scaling Law, pointing out that simply piling up compute and feeding more data couldn't guarantee continued model capability breakthroughs.

And DeepSeek's two new models directly challenged Scaling Law — further improving model capabilities required switching to the new technical route of reinforcement learning, not just stacking data and compute.

Then the big one hit.

On November 11, 2024 — Alibaba's most important day — Yang was hit with arbitration in Hong Kong by his former company Recurrent AI and some old shareholders,叠加过往的创始人套现，让Kimi陷入商业伦理争议，很大程度击碎了「天才少年」和「技术理想主义」的叙事光环。

The舆论漩涡让Kimi几乎失去了再次融资的可能性，尤其难有国资敢接盘。

What will become of Moonshot AI? I saw a humorous comment: Isn't Moonshot AI just a bigger version of Recurrent AI?

(This article's illustration was generated by ChatGPT 4o, with Gemini 2.5 Pro assisting in writing.)