On June 29, at the 10th Salt Club New Knowledge Youth Conference, Zhihu released the latest AI application product Zhihu Direct Answer.
Unlike most AI products on the market, Zhihu Direct Answer has fewer illusions because it is mainly based on real Q&A data from Zhihu creators. At the same time, Zhihu Direct Answer also focuses on connecting the relationship between users and creators, not only listing all citation sources, but also supporting users to trace the source at the paragraph level or even sentence level, helping more creators to be discovered by users.
The underlying logic of Zhihu's direct answer is to do AI search, which is currently a track that many major Internet companies and start-ups are optimistic about. The valuation of similar foreign products Perplexity has reached 3 billion US dollars.
Different from the collective "volume" large model of major companies in 2023, 2024 is known as the "first year of AI application", and the direction that investment institutions are optimistic about has also shifted from basic large models to AI applications, and the amount of investment in applications in the second quarter of this year has doubled year-on-year. In this context, Zhihu launched "Zhihu Direct Answer", stepping on the tuyere of the times. Zhou Yuan, founder, chairman and CEO of Zhihu, said that Zhihu Direct Answer is a new productivity tool and a connector to discover the world. He hopes that Zhihu Direct Answer can help everyone better "discover the world with questions", and build a more imaginative, creative, dynamic and vibrant community around tools and everyone.
Focus on authenticity and warmth
Zhihu Direct Answer is a conversational product, and it is also the official productization of Zhihu's AI search function. Zhihu Direct Answer also has an independent domain name and service entrance, which can bring better questioning, search, result generation and induction experience to users across the network. The product has been launched on the PC side and can be accessed through the "zhida.ai" domain name.
On the afternoon of June 29th, Ma Kui, the product leader of Zhihu Direct Answer, demonstrated this product in detail, and from his demonstration, Zhihu Direct Answer has two main features: one is real, and the other is temperature.
The authenticity of Zhihu's direct answer is reflected in the fact that it is mainly based on the real Q&A data of Zhihu creators. In the content of Zhihu Direct Answer, users can see which respondents contributed the answer, and can also see where the answer is quoted from. This is Zhihu's continued respect for respondents, creators and intellectual property rights. Ma Kui said that Zhihu Direct Answer strictly traces the source to ensure that the answer is reliable and true, and also alleviates the illusion problem in the field of AI.
The warmth of Zhihu's direct answer is mainly reflected in the understanding of user needs and respect for creators.
In the lower left corner of the input box of Zhihu Direct Answer, there are two buttons and an option, and users can choose between in-depth questions and answers or brief questions and answers. For example, in the case of "What are the phases of the Chang'e-6 mission?", the short style will show the results to the user in a very short form, and the in-depth mode will be very detailed. The original intention of this feature is that Zhihu found that some users want to do more in-depth research, and others want to know the answer quickly.
During the investigation, the Zhihu product team also found that some competing products only connect users and content, which is somewhat insufficient. The difference between Zhihu Direct Answer is that it not only allows users to find content, but also connects users, content and creators. This feature shows Zhihu Zhizhi's respect for creators. Ma Kui said that creators are the core of Zhihu, and many excellent answerers were difficult to be searched by users before, but Zhihu direct answers can make up for these shortcomings.
In Zhihu Direct Answer, users can search for respondents by field, and Zhihu Direct Answer will also organize and display the relevant information of the respondent to users. Ma Kui said that Zhihu uses AI technology not only to disseminate content, but also to shorten the distance between users and users, so that people can feel that there is temperature behind the answer.
At present, Zhihu direct answer is mainly in the PC access mode, and APP and multi-modal capabilities will be launched later. Ma Kui said that now is just a starting point, "Zhihu Direct Answer, as a brand-new product, is more like a key that opens the door to AI," Zhihu will listen to the voice of users, and the two modes of technology-driven and product-driven will go hand in hand in the future. Zhihu Direct Answer will also do more in-depth integration with the Zhihu community and actively explore foreign cooperation.
The potential of AI search
At the "Zhihu Discovery Conference" in March this year, Zhou Yuan, founder, chairman and CEO of Zhihu, demonstrated the new community-native AI function "Discovery · AI Search" function. At that time, Zhou Yuan said that it would bring users a new experience integrating new search, real-time Q&A and follow-up functions.
AI search is a track that Zhou Yuan is optimistic about, and it is also one of the most valuable tracks in the current AI application field. At present, in China, many companies have begun to do AI search, such as Kimi, 360, Baichuan Intelligence, Secret Tower, etc.
There are also a number of companies abroad that are exploring AI search. One of the most well-known startups, Perplexity, with a recent valuation of $3 billion, will be one of the most valuable companies in the AI industry. Perplexity's main business is AI search, which answers in a similar way to Zhihu Direct Answer, not providing a link, but directly providing text format. It is characterized by its ability to answer complex information that traditional searches do not do well.
As a complement to traditional search, Perplexity's high valuation has proven its value. Abroad, Perplexity is very popular, with more than 20 million monthly active users, and Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said that the one AI product he uses the most is Perplexity.
In addition to startups, Microsoft, OpenAI and other foreign companies are also deploying AI search, Microsoft CEO Nadella mentioned that AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category search. Their judgment proves that information retrieval is the best application for matching large models, and the feasibility of this track has been recognized by the industry. Zhihu's entry into AI search is also aimed at capturing the next outlet.
Compared with other companies that do AI search, one of the big advantages of Zhihu is the high-quality Chinese corpus. According to public data, as of Q1 2024, Zhihu has accumulated about 804 million pieces of content, covering more than 1,000 vertical fields. The Zhihu community solves a large number of problems that users cannot solve through search engines, and relying on community content to supplement the content of the whole network is the biggest advantage of Zhihu Direct Answer.
And Zhihu also has a self-developed model as a support. In 2023, the "Zhihaitu AI" large model will be launched, which is a large model developed on the basis of the mature large model CPM-Bee, with hundreds of billions of parameters, stronger logical reasoning capabilities, faster training and inference speeds. In the past year, the "Zhihaitu AI" model has been continuously iteratively upgraded, and through continuous optimization, whether it is the expansion of data sources or the tuning of models, the latest version of the model can bring users more comprehensive, more coherent, more logical, and even safer answers in Zhihu Direct Answer.