(Yicai) May 13 -- Chinese startup Moonshot AI is partnering with lifestyle content app RedNote on a 21-day competition aimed at increasing the visibility of its Kimi chatbot among everyday users by encouraging them to explore its key features through trending AI content creation tasks.

Users must use Kimi for 21 straight days and complete popular AI tasks on RedNote, known in Chinese as Xiaohongshu, according to the rules of the competition that began yesterday. They can generate travel guides, break down complex knowledge structures, or help in writing creative copy, with gifts and computing power rewards available after tasks are completed.

Kimi was the world's first AI assistant able to process inputs of up to 200,000 Chinese characters. But the explosive popularity of DeepSeek and continuous updates for ByteDance’s Doubao, Holdings' Yuanbao, and Alibaba Cloud's Qwen has blunted the chatbot’s competitive edge.

This community tie-up between Moonshot AI and RedNote, part of a marketing tie-up between the pair, may help Kimi reach consumer-end users and enhance its brand awareness.

Established in April 2023, Beijing-based Moonshot AI launched Kimi on Oct. 9 of that year. Its main uses are for translating and understanding academic papers, helping to analyze legal issues, and quickly understanding application programming interface development documents. 

Although Moonshot AI completed multiple financing rounds early on, the slowing pace of primary market investment and faster chatbot iteration cycles among competitors have added to the commercial pressure on the firm, according to industry insiders. The key issue for generative AI startups is converting technological progress into a money maker, which is a crucial step for such businesses to establish a sustainable market presence, they added.

On April 28, Moonshot AI announced that it had reached a content cooperation agreement with Caixin, with Kimi combining reports from the Chinese financial media group to generate answers for users' financial-related questions.

AI is a key investment area for RedNote. The app has a separate AI column where Kimi and Minimax's Talkie are available.

Editor: Martin Kadiev