Source: Shenzhen Net Tencent News

Human joys and sorrows are not consistent. Since the first year of artificial intelligence started in 2016, the AI ​​industry has undergone several rounds of reshuffle. With the east wind of ChatGPT, DeepSeek has stirred up the entire big model market like a catfish. Manufacturers who are also big model startups and are regarded as the upstart "Six Little Dragons" by the industry, compared with it, the situation is so sunrise in the east and rain in the west.

DeepSeek shocked the industry after launching the DeepSeek-V3 with low cost and performance comparable to GPT-4o a few years ago. It then released the R1 model on January 20, and ranked first in the global download list of Apple's App Store six days later, with a cumulative download volume of more than 110 million times in one month of online launch. During this period, major cloud manufacturers quickly launched the open source version of V3 and R1, and Baidu Search, WeChat and other products are actively embracing DeepSeek.

The Kimi global reinforcement learning model k1.5 and step reasoning model Step R-mini released at the same time as DeepSeek are close to o1 in many aspects of model capabilities, but they are still submerged in DeepSeek's popular public opinion.

Compared with the noise of DeepSeek, the "Six Little Dragons" also revealed one after another: Zero-10,000 things are further split, the dark side budget and arbitration case have not been settled, and another executive of MIniMax has resigned...

Behind this, there are frustrated VCs: none of the projects supported by real money have reached the popularity of DeepSeek. At present, there have been no news of financing for four of the "Six Little Dragons" for more than half a year. In 2024, the industry said that two of the "Six Little Dragons" have fallen behind. In 2025, who will fall behind next?

Only three companies remain to continue to take root in the big model

The popularity of DeepSeek is not without signs. Since the launch of the first model, DeepSeek Coder on November 2, 2023, more than 10 different versions of the models have been launched in more than a year. Among them, the V2 model released in May last year is comparable to the GPT-4 Turbo in performance, but the price is only 1% of that of GPT-4. Therefore, DeepSeek is called the "price butcher" and "Pinduoduo in the AI ​​industry", and it also set off the first round of price war in the big model industry.

On January 27, 2025, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT and topped the free list of Apple APP Store in the US, attracting global attention. What made DeepSeek so successful is its inference mockup DeepSeek-R1. According to information released by DeepSeek, R1 scored similar to the official version of o1 in many authoritative tests, and the scores in some tests exceeded the official version of o1.

In addition to the list score, open source + cost-effectiveness is an important combination of DeepSeek that has caused great popularity. Affected by DeepSeek, former closed-source believer Baidu founder Robin Li also announced his joining the open source team, OpenAIFounder Ultraman Sam also reflected that the company has always been on the "wrong side" in its strategy in the open source field.

MiniMax, the big model "Six Little Dragons", released its first open source model on January 15. Its founder Yan Junjie also said in an interview with "Late" that "I don't have many experiences in starting a business for the first time. If I can choose again, I should open source on the first day." Among the other five little dragons, only Zhipu was the first to open source and close source to walk on two legs. After nearly two years of hard work, the development direction of the "Six Little Dragons" has gone in a completely different way.

Zero1000 is the first basic big model company to be publicly adjusted significantly. It first abolished the pre-training algorithm team and the Infra team. Some people joined Alibaba in the form of job-changing, and later announced that they jointly established an industrial big model joint laboratory and industrial big model base with Alibaba Cloud and Suzhou High-tech Zone.

In terms of personnel, Huang Wenhao, the person in charge of model training, Lan Yuchuan, the person in charge of the open platform of the big model API, and Cao Dapeng, the person in charge of the productivity product, all resigned one after another. The zero-one things that try to stay on the card table cannot cover up the decline in this round of mock-up competition.

Baichuan Intelligent has made it clear that it will take the medical track in 2024 and recently launched its first "AI pediatrician". The commercialization of To B seems to be not going well. Hong Tao, its co-founder and head of commercialization, had already resigned a year ago. According to an employee of Baichuan, it was indeed not as expected. "Now with DeepSeek, the pressure this year has only increased and not decreased." The person in charge of commercialization of To B also resigned. Wei Wei from MiniMax said in an interview that many B-side customers will not pay this money easily to support the revenue of large-scale model companies. They can only help customers align the output effects in actual scenarios based on R&D capabilities and algorithm capabilities, which also confirms that commercialization of large-scale models is not easy.

In this way, the only ones who are still focusing on big model technology innovation and pursuing AGI are the dark side of the moon, the wisdom spectrum, and the leap of the stars. Influenced by DeepSeek, Step Yuexingchen has also joined the open source camp. However, unlike DeepSeek's focus on text models, Step Yuexingchen's latest open source are two multimodal models - Step-Video-T2V and Step-Audio.

In the early morning of February 23, the Dark Side of the Moon released the latest paper "Muon is Scalable for LLM Training", and opened the source MoE model Moonlight, with only 3B activation parameters required for the model. Many industry insiders believe that this is the "Intercepting the Husband and Open Source Week", because DeepSeek earlier announced that it would release open source projects for five consecutive days.

For the dark side of the moon, the one that burns the eyebrows may be its massive Kimi product.

Buying money and investing is hard to become the top brother on the list

Like the big model "Six Little Dragons", DeepSeek also has a C-end product of the same name, which did not cause too much impact in the market in the first week after its launch.Note. According to data disclosed by QuestMobile to the media, from January 13 to January 19, 2025, the weekly download volume of DeepSeek App was only 285,000, far less than Doubao (4.52 million) and Kimi (1.557 million).

After the release of R1 on January 20, 2025, DeepSeek downloads began to grow steeply. Sensor Tower research shows that DeepSeek downloads exceeded 16 million times in 18 days of the press conference, almost twice the 9 million times when OpenAI's ChatGPT was first released.

The surge in visits once caused DeepSeek to crash. Even so, the growth momentum is still very strong, with monthly downloads exceeding 110 million. No one of the DeepSeek's brilliance can be ignored. On February 13, when CEO Liang Rubo talked about DeepSeek, he reflected on the lack of follow-up speed and pursued intelligent launch this year.

Tencent's WeChat grayscale test is connected to DeepSeek's AI search. After the usage volume exceeds expectations, it calls the AI ​​application Yuanbao to support WeChat search. On February 22, Tencent Yuanbao surpassed Bytes' bean bag and rose to the second place in the Apple free APP download rankings, and DeepSeek continued to top the list.

The "Big Brothers on the First and Second List" changed hands in just one month, forcing money to exchange for growth bean bags and Kimi no longer have the advantages. The difference between the two is that the former is a noble born with a "golden key" and the latter is a "start-up". Previously, media calculated that Kimi's daily investment amount was close to 200,000 yuan on the iPhone channel alone, while Doubao was 2.48 million yuan.

Under the influence of DeepSeek, the Dark Side of the Moon has been reported to have significantly reduced its product placement budget, including suspending the placement of multiple Android channels and cooperation with third-party advertising platforms. According to insiders to "AI Light Years", the promotion has indeed made corresponding adjustments, "There are natural new additions, but it cannot be compared with the growth trend of DeepSeek."

kimi's current worries are more than these: "Underwind Waves" exclusively learned that the Kimi arbitration case, which has been shelved for a long time, did not complete the settlement as expected, but entered the next process of the arbitration case. According to insiders, the two parties to the Kimi arbitration case, the old shareholder of Cycle Intelligence and Yang Zhilin, have completed the payment at HKIAC (Hong Kong International Arbitration Center) in the end of January and late February respectively, and the party has been completed. The more critical protagonist behind the entire incident, Zhang Yutong, may be filed separately.

MiniMax also has high expectations for To C products, because its celebrity product Talkie became the fourth largest AI application in the United States in the first half of 2024, making it sweet. But the good times didn't last long. Talkie quietly disappeared in the Apple app store in the US market in mid-December, while the Android platform was unaffected.

Skills, Zero One Wanwu, Zhipu AI and Baichuan Intelligent also have their own AI application products, but according to the AI ​​product list, in January 2025, none of the top 20 AI applications in the monthly active users are related to these four manufacturers. Previously, Baichuan Intelligent's employees told AI Light Years, "It's not surprising that Bai Xiaoying's user retention and growth are bad. We basically do not advertise and let other companies spend money to complete user education first."

At present, DeepSeek, Tencent Yuanbao, and ByteDoubao occupy the top three Apple's free APP download rankings. If the big model "Six Little Dragons" wants to be on the list, the competition will only be more intense. Zhou Hongyi, currently ranked seventh, is personally taking the stage to "bring goods".

Another rival that cannot be ignored is Alibaba. After the AI ​​application Tongyi was incorporated into the Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group, Alibaba's AI To C business recently launched large-scale recruitment, with hundreds of positions, focusing on product and technology research and development positions related to AI big model. There are wolves in front and tigers behind, which is a true portrayal of the current situation of the big model "Six Little Dragons".

When the technology story is no longer romantic, commercialization is less than expected, and the monthly active users of the product are not proportional to investment, the big model "Six Little Dragons" are ideal and full of reality.

The next round of financing threshold is raised

It is a recognized fact that big model pre-training is burning money. Kai-Fu Lee once revealed that the cost of pre-training is about $30 million. Even Yi-Lightning, which is cheaper, also used 2,000 GPUs during training, which took one and a half months and cost more than $3 million.

Even DeepSeek, which claims to be low-cost, has an incalculable investment in the early stage. According to third-party agency SemiAnalysis, DeepSeek actually has a huge computing power reserve: a total of 60,000 Nvidia GPU cards have been built, including 10,000 A1 million, 10,000 H1 million, 10,000 "special version" H800 and 30,000 "special version" H20.

"The training cost of general big model is estimated to be about 1 billion US dollars. This is only the computing power part, and the other two very expensive parts are not counted. One is data and the other is labor cost. Now talents in the global big model field are very scarce." Dr. Du Feng, founding partner of Jiangmen Venture Capital and former head of Microsoft Venture Capital, once told the author.

Because such high investment is required, a saying has been popular in the industry for a long time: the ticket to investing in big model companies is US$100 million. Another signal behind this sentence is that a big model startup will find it difficult to survive if it cannot obtain financing.

After the 100-model war in 2023, financing news will be released almost every other month. However, with the popularity of AI bubble theory, starting from September 2024, hundreds of millions of hot money have not flowed to the big model "Six Little Dragons". Until before the Spring Festival in 2025, Zhipu and Jieyuexingchen announced that they had obtained "winter money", and the former announced that they had completed a new one.A round of financing of RMB 3 billion, the latter completed a round of financing of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The other four of the "Six Little Dragons" have been more than half a year since the last financing trend was released: MiniMax officially announced that it had completed a US$600 million Series B financing in March last year, Baichuan Intelligent received a Series A financing of 5 billion yuan in July last year, Zero-100 million Series financing in August last year, and Monthly Dark Side completed a US$300 million Series financing in August last year.

During the Spring Festival, DeepSeek became popular all over the world, and public opinion praised DeepSeek and its founder Liang Wenfeng without hesitation. In the venture capital circle, a lot of news has been circulating recently about whether DeepSeek will start financing and how much valuation it is.

There was previously reported that Alibaba would be valued at US$10 billion, with an investment of US$1 billion to account for 10% of the shares. In response, Alibaba Vice President Yan Qiao quickly denied the rumors through his circle of friends, saying that "the information about Alibaba's investment in DeepSeek is fake news." Later, foreign media said that "DeepSeek is considering raising external funds for the first time." DeepSeek related people refuted the rumors, and the financing news was all rumor.

"Many investors directly or rely on their relationship to Liang Wenfeng. I predict that the valuation should be far beyond the current 'big model Six Xiaolongs'." An investor in CICC said, "DeepSeek has become the benchmark target. Six Xiaolongs have to obtain new financing in the primary market, and the threshold is obviously higher."

In fact, since the wave of big model entrepreneurship has begun, the industry generally does not believe that the "six Xiaolongs" can eventually survive as independent "big model companies". Several founders of the "Six Little Dragons" have also expressed similar views in public, such as MiniMax founder Yan Junjie, who believes that there will only be five large-scale companies left in the world in the future.

" There must be our own ChatGPT. This is like a search engine. We have our own compliance requirements. However, the version of ChatGPT will only be generated in 5 companies: BAT+Byte+Huawei." Cheng Hao, founder of Thunder and Yuanwang Capital, once told the author.

With the continued popularity, the "Six Little Dragons" that are already moving towards differentiation will accelerate the reshuffle.