Innovators
1 Curated Dialogues
Koji
Key Views & Dialogues
From Lobster to Zhao Yun and A Dou: My 10 AI Aha Moments
Minghao sees Seedance’s short-drama flywheel linking production, distribution, ad monetization, model reinvestment and user data, with an ecosystem far larger than Kling’s. OpenAI shut Sora Tool on March 24, but fringe markets remain viable. Perplexity may be worth $20B–$30B, while four or five Character.AI-category companies may exceed $10M in monthly revenue.
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- 明浩’s first 2026 aha moment was OpenClaw’s rise around Lunar New Year: the agent and harness product paradigm may be starting to converge. Queues outside Tencent to get machines set up, the scramble for Mac minis and even people paying others to install them all showed that “the Pandora’s box had been opened.” The full stack—components, local or cloud deployment, always-on devices and notification channels—is now standard in personal agents; reposts of OpenClaw update posts fell from tens of thousands to thousands, then to dozens.
- In the video-model race, 明浩 sees Seedance as the acknowledged leader, with short dramas providing a key full-stack advantage. ByteDance can produce and distribute content, monetize it with ads, then reinvest the revenue in the model while keeping user-behavior data in its own system. Google may not prioritize multimodality highly, and Kling’s ecosystem is much smaller than Seedance’s. Whether world models and general-purpose models converge remains an open question. 王兴兴 said GPT-7 “should break through physics”—a potential challenge or threat to independent embodied-AI companies.
- Vertical AI still has room to win; investors need not focus only on companies worth $1T or $2T. OpenAI’s March 24 shutdown of Sora Tool reopened the debate over whether model makers can absorb every market. 明浩 sees merit on both sides, with large companies also emerging on the fringes: Perplexity may already be worth $20B–$30B, while four or five companies in Character.AI’s category have gained traction and may be generating more than $10M in monthly revenue. For early-stage investors, “a $1B company may just have closed its angel round.”
- AlphaGo’s June 4 release of “When AI Builds Itself” struck 明浩 as a sign of many trends to come in the second half. Two images sketched a future of models training their successors, with humans eventually disappearing; leading labs are now investing in RSI, lifting downstream businesses in post-training, RL environments, data and benchmarks. Security concerns are also intensifying: he said the zero-day vulnerability window had compressed to the order of 0.000000001, and relayed that AlphaGo had observed a model linking more than 20 TV boxes together to run.
- Model capability, cost and evaluation are all shifting. The time for Qwen 3.8 27B to catch the previous generation’s SOTA has fallen from 18–24 months in the GPT-4o era to 9 months. Visualizations of models’ “kill lines” are starting to displace score tables; Koji added that the top 10 models by benchmark on OpenRouter went from about 80% of usage to about 20% over five quarters. The App Store’s first-ever revenue decline may have several causes, but 明浩 sees vibe coding as one important factor.
- Leading models are starting to produce spectacles, while people may push back against relentlessly polished visuals. Opus 5.5 can help create podcasts with dynamic visualizations; by contrast, the WeChat mini-game Zhao Yun and A Dou uses text to depict its visuals, and 明浩 sees its roughness as a deliberate counterpoint. AI’s share of the podcast festival’s programming is also falling. His closing wish was to “enjoy life,” adding, “We’ll keep the anxiety for ourselves.”