Author | Liu Baodan From performance to market confidence, Meituan is walking out of a three-year low point, but Wang Xing is not stopping there - he has even bigger plans. Going overseas has become a must for Chinese companies. Meituan, which has been warming up for 8 years, has finally made up its mind to put going overseas on the agenda. Recently, Meituan began recruiting senior engineers for international silver enterprise direct connection. After the model was successful in the Hong Kong market, Meituan officially kicked off its overseas expansion, accelerated recruitment and put the first stop of the overseas expansion in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Going overseas is a critical turning point, which means that after more than ten years of capacity accumulation, Meituan has to export its local life capabilities to the world, which is as significant as the replication of TikTok by ByteDance. In the wave of Internet companies going overseas, Meituan went overseas later because local life patterns are more important than social, e-commerce and other industries. However, Wang Xing must make this move. Against the background of intensified domestic competition and the shrinking of community group buying, he must find a new growth story. On his entrepreneurial journey, Wang Xing is still determined to create a new business legend in this global adventure. A must-have question. Meituan has fought a beautiful takeaway battle in Hong Kong. On May 6, Measurable AI, a market research firm, released the latest data showing that by March 2024, according to the number of orders, KeeTa, the takeaway business of Meituan in Hong Kong, has a market share of 44%, rising to the largest takeaway platform in Hong Kong. However, Hong Kong is only a stopover for Meituan's overseas expansion, and Meituan has set its real meaning of going overseas in Saudi Arabia. Wall Street news learned that Meituan has been recruiting people around the direction of going overseas in the past two months. The positions include engineers, overseas human resources and operation experts, international payment and transaction product managers, mainly responsible for payments, employee management and related products in overseas markets. More importantly, the recruitment of local talents. More than a month ago, Meituan posted relevant recruitment information on LinkedIn and the Middle East recruitment platform Baye.com, with Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, as the place of work. From the city selection, Meituan did not choose the United States with a larger market space, nor did it choose Southeast Asia where culture and food are more similar, but chose Saudi Arabia. It can be seen that Meituan's overseas expansion strategy still has a heavy experimental component and is more cautious. Wang Xing is not fighting an unprepared battle. For this overseas expansion, Meituan has been planning for many years. As early as 2016, Wang Xing began to consider the issue of going overseas and visited Silicon Valley, Berlin, Israel, Jakarta and other places. In 2017, Meituan officially laid out overseas accommodation business, first connecting hotels in nearly 100 countries overseas to the Meituan application. At that time, the domestic and foreign takeaway wars were in full swing, and with Meituan's listing in Hong Kong in 2018, Wang Xing's overseas strategy was forced to be shelved. Since then, Meituan has also made a series of international investments, including Swiggy in India, Gojek in Indonesia, and Opay in Nigeria, involving food, taxis, payments and other fields, to prepare for going overseas. Along with the frequent news reports of Meituan's victory in Hong Kong, Meituan's overseas plan was finally brought to an unprecedented strategic height in 2024, and Wang Xing once again rushed to the forefront. In February, Meituan put the home business group, the in-store business group and other businesses into the core local business sector, and appointed Wang Putong as CEO, while Wang Xing personally took charge of overseas business, which ensured the landing of the overseas expansion strategy in the organizational structure. In fact, before the confirmation of the overseas expansion strategy, Wang Xing personally visited the Middle East last May and met with members of the Saudi royal family, laying the foundation for Meituan's layout in Saudi Arabia.

In today's weather is good. Today's weather is good.

Over a month ago, Byte released the Doubao large model family, directly bringing the large model price into the "millicentric era". Now, Kuaishou has also brought out the bottom of the box large model matrix, targeting tool applications.

On July 6th, at the "New AI, New Applications, New Ecology" forum, Kuaishou's large models made their first collective appearance. Multiple new features of products such as video generation large models capable of spiritualness and image generation large models capable of graphics were officially released.

Gai Kun, Kuaishou's senior vice president and head of station business and community science, stated that Kuaishou has built a large model matrix centered on Kuaishou's language large model, recommendation large model, and vision generation large model, covering multiple levels such as content understanding, distribution, and generation, and serving Kuaishou's commercial ecological scene.

Kuaishou has launched a self-developed + application large model matrix for the AI era, focusing on the efficiency improvement and performance growth of Kuaishou's business. Kuaishou has finally started to shine in the large model market.

Appearance

After a long anticipation, Kuaishou's large models finally appeared.

At the meeting, Kuaishou announced that the self-developed visual generation large model product Keling AI web version was officially launched. This is the third major upgrade Keling AI has in one month, which means that ordinary users can log in to the website for feature testing.

Basic models of Keling AI have also been upgraded, with clearer high-quality versions, as well as new editing capabilities such as head and tail frame control and lens control. At the same time, the video length created by creators at one time has been increased to 10 seconds, which is the longest time limit allowed in the industry for users to use.

It is reported that Keling AI is based on the rules of the real world physics and generates videos with movie-level quality and motion effects, and can even simulate large-scale physical movements, breaking the limitations of traditional video generation technology, and has won praise at home and abroad.

Wan Pengfei, head of Kuaishou's vision generation and interactive center, said that in the latest version of the Keling AI large model, Keling AI's ability highlights in seven directions such as automatic generation, generated length, physical laws, video quality, instruction response, graphic video, and video controllability have been further upgraded, and it can generate 10 seconds or longer videos that are clearer and more controllable at one time.

Since the launch of Wen Sheng video function on June 6th, Keling has grown rapidly. During the CVPR (IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), Keling released multiple new functions such as chart-generated videos and video continuation.

At this forum, Kuaishou also officially announced that Keting will be open sourced.

Gai Kun introduced that Keting large model integrates Kuaishou's deep accumulation in the field of large language models. By training on billions of Chinese language corpora, it has become the most knowledgeable text-to-image model in Chinese, its comprehensive performance surpasses open source models such as SDXL/SD3 and closed source models such as Midjourney, and has set a new benchmark for image generation in the Chinese scene.

Regarding the open source action, Gai Kun stated that this initiative aims to stimulate industry vitality and co-create a more prosperous Wen Sheng image large model community ecosystem.

Prospects

From the beginning, Kuaishou made it clear that the core goal of large models is to serve Kuaishou's internal scenes and commercialization.

This is mainly reflected in two aspects. One is content production. Kuaishou aims to create a "new generation of AIGC creation and material tools" and a low-threshold, intelligent content production experience. The second is content consumption. Kuaishou intends to upgrade its content understanding and distribution system to improve user consumption experience.

The former mainly serves Kuaishou's commercial efficiency. It is understood that the video script generation tool based on Kuaiyi's large model, combined with digital human technology, helps Kuaiyi's commercial advertisers generate videos and live content at low cost and improves the efficiency of lead conversion.

Kuaishou's data shows that AIGC marketing materials reached a single-day consumption peak of over 20 million in June this year, demonstrating the huge potential of large models in commercial scenarios.

Liu Xiaoxiao, head of Kuaishou's commercial external loop and AI commercial product, revealed that in the past six months, nearly 20,000 merchants have used the large model capability on the Kuaishou platform to achieve intelligent operation. Compared with January this year, the number of active users of AIGC in June increased eightfold, the monthly GMV scale increased 64-fold, and the platform's AIGC advertising revenue scale increased 12-fold.

In terms of content production, the bigger market prospect comes from C-end users and related industries including short videos.

According to Gai Kun, as of now, more than 0.5 million users have applied for the test qualification of Keling. The number of video generated is up to 7 million. Especially the works created by users through "Keling," such as "Resurrection of Old Photos," have become popular all over the Internet due to the power of touching people's hearts.

At the annual performance conference in March, Cheng Yixiao, the founder and CEO of Kwai, said that after launching the AI strategy in 2023, the company has been gradually promoting the self-developed large model's R&D and training. For the video generation, Kwai has already promoted special research and development at the end of last year.

"This is a huge opportunity for the short video ecosystem. In the future, Kwai will combine the generation model and the producer tools to continuously help creators reduce the threshold of creation and improve the production quality and efficiency of short videos." Cheng Yixiao emphasized.

In terms of industry, Kwai's large model has already been used in the production of short dramas. The country's first AIGC original fantasy short drama "Shanhaiqijing's Pibozhanlang" supported by Keling has already released a trailer and will be launched soon.

Zhang Di, vice president of Kwai and head of the large model team, said," Probably half a year ago, we couldn't imagine making movies with AIGC. (Now it's here!) "In his view, using AI technology can greatly improve the efficiency of short drama production, production, and operation.

In terms of content consumption, the larger role is played by the recommended large model SIM. According to Kaikun's introduction, with the scale of 10 trillion parameters, the model has become one of the world's leading recommendation systems. Its next-generation architecture ACT is expected to add 0.4 billion minutes of user viewing time to the Kwai App daily, significantly improving user stickiness and activity.

For the future, Kwai is very confident. Gai Kun said that Kwai will continue to increase investment in the field of AI and vigorously promote technological innovation.