Moonshot AI,?? ?? ?? a one-year-old artificial intelligence venture founded by Tsinghua University graduate Yang Zhilin, is valued at $2.5 billion after a $1 billion round of fundraising recently. Investors, including venture capital firm Hongshan, Instagram-like Xiaohongshu, Meituan, and Alibaba, were reported by Chinese media outlet 36Kr on Monday. According to Moonshot AI’s official site, the core members of the founding team have participated in the research and development of multiple LLMs, such as Google’s Gemini and Bard, as well as Huawei’s Pangu NLP. It is also mentioned that a number of its core technologies have been adopted by Google PaLM, Meta LLaMa, and Stable Diffusion. The Beijing-based firm currently provides access to its only ToC product – a ChatGPT-like bot named Kimi.ai – on its website, describing the tool as capable of reading a 200,000-word novel in one sitting. [36Kr, in Chinese]