The unknown AI disruptor

Yu Lili is the first person in China's technology media in 2024, although many people have never heard of her name. After deepseek exploded, we found that Liang Wenfeng had only been interviewed twice, and the dozens of basic questions he answered were all from Yu Lili. If there was no such person, then this epic breakthrough, China's technology media can only tell the world with underwear: we know nothing about heroes.

The mainstream of the media industry is a group of palace maids vying for favor, opening their breasts and throwing themselves at the bosses of big companies, trying their best to get some inside information, grab an interview opportunity with the bosses, and be turned over. As for the speculators among entrepreneurs, their strategy is to "make friends" with the media, give face and orders, in exchange for the labels of "China's OpenAI" and "technical idealism". A group of actors jointly created the world of fame and fortune, sucking the eyes of the masses and deceiving the world and stealing their reputation.

Yu Lili is better than a hundred famous reporters and big Vs, and Liang Wenfeng is better than ten thousand Olympic champions and returning doctors. They do not pick low-hanging fruits, but sink into the water with one heart. They will not add icing on the cake, but help when the snow is snowing. They are true believers of being nameless and practicing swordsmanship. Children who expose the emperor's new clothes.

This is not flattery, but a sword-drawing. Liang Wenfeng and Yu Lili are just names, and their true identity is a subconscious. Yu Lili said in her circle of friends that she used to be a cultural reporter, and she was moved by the real cultural gravity of Liang Wenfeng. Liang Wenfeng said that technical advantages are short-lived, and the real moat is culture and organization.

We asked questions to deepseek, but we only received the energy of technology and products. Only by understanding these people in the soul can we receive spiritual energy. It is the spiritual energy that created these people. That is the reason.

Lu Qi is a close friend of Ultraman and an old colleague in the startup incubator YC. He told a story. When Ultraman started his business in his early years, he received a call from a client one day saying that he was out of the bidding. Ultraman flew over immediately. When the client arrived at the company early the next morning, Ultraman was already waiting at the door. He turned the tide and finally won the order.

This story disappointed me very much. Ultraman was not the chosen one. A truly strong will is not reflected in pestering. Instead, it should be reflected in the fact that my things are ten times better than everyone else's, and the other party is waiting at my door by plane overnight, not the other way around.

I started working as a journalist in 2003. A senior in the industry told me that I should interview 50 entrepreneurs a year, build up my personal network, and lock in the next Ding Lei and Chen Tianqiao in advance. When they reach the top, your relationship with them will be extraordinary.

This well-intentioned reminder also disappointed me. I don’t think that the value of a journalist comes from the relationship with the richest people. It comes from being in the same frame with them, being crowned by them, or asking for investment when starting a business. Once a big star was asked, when will you marry into a wealthy family? She said, I am a wealthy family.

Ultraman and Liang Wenfeng were both born in 1985. Ultraman is a Silicon Valley style. Like Gates and Zuckerberg, he dropped out of school to start a business, and then achieved some success. He was successively invested by two Silicon Valley bigwigs, Graham and Thiel, and then became their partner and was crowned by them. Liang Wenfeng is another species. He finished his master's degree and remained unknown for more than ten years.

Also in 2015, when the two were 30 years old, Altman approached Musk, who was more powerful than Graham and Thiel, and the two founded OpenAI together, while Liang Wenfeng founded the quantitative fund Huanfang alone, which used AI as a tool to trade stocks and used stock trading as a tool to hone AI. This is Liang Wenfeng's two-legged hot wheel.

What's even more different is that seven years ago from 2015, until 2008, Altman started a mobile Internet business and then became the boss of YC, which had nothing to do with AI. Liang Wenfeng, who had just graduated from Zhejiang University, anchored the direction of AI at the age of 23. He was thinking in a residential building in Chengdu where the most in-depth soil for AI was. He started at least seven years earlier than Altman.

When Altman turned OpenAI from a non-profit project to a profit-making project, got Microsoft's investment, and broke with Musk and was forced out by Sutskevi. Liang Wenfeng raised himself with the money from the quantitative fund, so in his world, there is no Microsoft's constraints, no Musk's falling out, no Sutskevi's coup, and no fighting between the left and the right.

Liang Wenfeng's freedom was earned by starting 7 years in advance. And these 7 years are the fruits of an original intention. This original intention determines everything and determines the epic turnaround we see today.

When computing power becomes a bottleneck in 2023, analysts suddenly discovered that in addition to the four major manufacturers that have 10,000 Nvidia boards, there is also a magic square, a name that has hardly been heard of in the Internet circle.

Behind this cold number, a young man has spent 15 years on this channel, crawling like a turtle. When electric vehicles exploded in 2021, Wang Chuanfu had been crawling on this track for more than 20 years. BYD in 2021 is the same as deepseek in 2025.

The fact that is even more magical than this is that when Ultraman and Musk founded OpenAI in 2015, Liang Wenfeng already had 100 boards in his hands. We don't know when he got his first board. It may be in 2012, when Hinton used four boards to run through the neural network and opened the door to the AI ​​blowout. It was also when Google bid 44 million US dollars to repel Baidu and take down Hinton's master and apprentice. The seeds have been planted long ago, but no one knows.

This is a race between a tortoise and a hare, an ancient oriental story, but it is not the core.

In the autobiography authorized by Ultraman, the author Zhou Hengxing wrote: Ultraman is best at finding the most powerful person in the room at a glance and making this person like him. He is not a geek, but a politician. He bows to power, lends aid to his enemies, makes enemies with old friends, and allies with opponents.

Liang Wenfeng is different. Yu Lili asked, how do you confirm that you are the most suitable person. Liang Wenfeng said, we love this thing and have the ability to do this thing, that is the most suitable person. The difference between Liang Wenfeng and Ultraman is whether your energy comes from inside or outside. From the outside, it is a chemical reaction. From the inside, it is a nuclear reaction.

Wang Xing and Huang Zheng have been looking for various outlets since graduation, and have been trying and failing. Zhang Yiming once wandered between large and small factories, Zhichun Road and Zhongguancun, absorbing various experiences and resources. Ultraman is a collection of them. He is the social center of Silicon Valley and the heir of the bigwigs. He has been designing a new world from AI to nuclear energy, from world currency to universal basic income. Only Liang Wenfeng was completely alone from the beginning, digging out all the elements from his inner self. The graduate who sat alone in a residential building in Chengdu in 2008, wasn't he what the French director Truffaut said: crazy embrace of ambition, crazy sincerity. Isn't it exactly what Wang Guowei said about a realm of life: Last night the west wind withered the green trees, I went up to the high building alone, looking at the end of the world. Sutskevi is a Western geek, and Ultraman is a Western politician. They are incompatible. So this geek launched a coup against the politician, trying to replace his control of the strongest technological power, and ended in failure. But then, the Western politician was pierced by the geek from the East. Liang Wenfeng's success is the success of long-termism, the success of introverts, and pure success. It is the failure of speculators, actors and politicians, and ingenuity.

Chinese companies that are eligible for national bans in the United States. The first generation is Huawei, and the second generation is TikTok. The generation gap between the two is that Huawei's telecommunications equipment is aimed at a very small number of companies and has not entered the United States in time, while TikTok serves the masses and allows half of Americans to become its users. Therefore, banning Huawei only requires a ban, while banning TikTok will cause public outrage.

TikTok is like a Trojan horse, something that the Chinese have done for the first time. You claim freedom, but you are not free. You advocate competition, but you are afraid of competition. Huawei reveals the underwear of Americans to everyone except the United States. TikTok reveals this underwear to Americans themselves.

Deepseek is the third generation. When Zhang Yiming was pushing TikTok to the world, he bought traffic crazily in a time window. Once missed, it may be overtaken by competitors. But today, deepseek is dominating the charts in more than 100 countries at the same time, with zero investment.

TikTok is just an entertainment black hole, but deepseek is productivity, a new nuclear bomb that can mass-produce Einstein. So the United States just wants to drive TikTok out, but when it comes to deepseek, it wants to completely ban chips and completely decouple.

An Indian said decades ago that the United States is an open system with closed ideas, and China is a closed system with open ideas. Today, its reality is a closed OpenAI and an open deepseek.

The United States has an open system because it has open finance and an open information platform. China's semi-closed system, because the RMB cannot be freely converted, also has an information firewall.

The brutal ban on Huawei, TikTok, and deepseek is the closed thinking of the United States. The open system of the United States is essentially for winning. If my strength absolutely crushes others, then an open system is most conducive to attracting resources and talents. But when someone can challenge my strength, then openness will instantly become closed. This is the closure of thought and soul.

But Chinese thinking is not zero-sum, but coexistence. In the closed space of East Asia, survival must compromise, must share, and continue the cultural strategy formed over thousands of years. So open source just fits the soul of the Chinese, so deepseek open source, attracting Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon to be compatible overnight, and growing interest allies within the United States.

The cross is a totem of the West, the thing that crucified Jesus. The cross is composed of two straight lines, which extend infinitely without an end. This is an open system. But the two ends of the straight line are getting farther and farther away, and the two straight lines are separated from each other. This is a world of binary opposition, heaven versus hell, angels versus demons, winners and losers are irreconcilable. This is a closed mind.

The Tai Chi diagram is a totem of China. Tai Chi is first of all a circle, and the Yin-Yang fish live inside the circle, which is a closed system. There are no straight lines in the Tai Chi diagram, only curves. The Yin-Yang fish are in each other. This is an open mind. So the Chinese learn from their opponents and want to coexist with everyone. The most concise expression of the Tai Chi diagram is "harmony but difference".

In this ideological soil, a 23-year-old graduate enjoys loneliness in a poor street, and he can only face his soul deeply. Who am I, where am I going, I prepare all the dry food by myself, I don't need anyone to understand, and walk all the way step by step. Then, one person grows into a forest.

At least 1/3 to 1/2 of the top AI people on the planet today are Chinese. Most of them are in the United States, such as Huang Renxun and Li Feifei, and a small number are in China. Those in China are either already star entrepreneurs, such as Yang Zhilin, or around big guys like Zhang Yiming.

But until deepseek came out, everyone realized that the people who were best at AI were all in a small team, and no one from top to bottom had an American diploma. They were purely local.

A Japanese who won the Nobel Prize said that the exam-oriented education in East Asia destroyed many lives. But if lives were destroyed, why did someone win the Nobel Prize, why was there an East Asian economic miracle. A sociologist also said that if you work hard for ten years, you will never get a good horse. People who have received university education in China cannot make original scientific and technological innovations. What about Shi Yigong, Yang Zhilin and Pan Wenfeng?

In the 30 years since the reform and opening up, many science and engineering students from Tsinghua University and Peking University, which recruit 90% of China's top scorers in the college entrance examination, went to the United States. Most of them did not return to China and became coders for Indians and Anglo-Saxons. Those who returned to China, starting with Zhang Chaoyang and Li Yanhong, and later Huang Zheng and Wang Xing, have built a business that is a hundred times more than those who stayed in the United States.

But these sea turtles lost to the locals who had never been abroad. The earliest Zhang Chaoyang and Liang Jianzhang lost to Ding Lei and Chen Tianqiao. Later, Li Yanhong was suppressed by Ma Huateng and Ma Yun, Huang Zheng and Wang Xing were not as good as Zhang Yiming, and today Yang Zhilin was completely defeated by Liang Wenfeng. Then there are two god-like figures in new energy, Wang Chuanfu and Zeng Yuqun. This is overwhelming, with almost no exceptions.

These people are all the fruits of China. If the collective culture of a unified society will restrict people's creativity, then how can these people and this soil challenge the United States on their own?

Standardized examination-oriented education will restrict people's thinking. But it has a big advantage, that is, in a certain direction, it can sharpen people's mentality of continuous improvement. Letting a hundred flowers bloom is not the reality of this world. The reality is that the boss wants to trample everyone under his feet. In the jungle world, a bigger fist will overwhelm everyone, just like getting one more point in the test will kill a thousand people.

In a world where the strong prey on the weak, there are not so many peaceful days. Born in hardship and died in comfort is the cruelest bottom of education. Tiger parents know this deep in their hearts.

The shortcomings of standardized test-oriented education are offset by two other things. Real education is in society, not in school. The energy of the market economy is a hundred times stronger than that of the test. Since 1978, the market economy has taught the Chinese that there is no standard answer. You can only use your unique abilities to meet the unique needs of others.

In 1995, the Internet is a hundred times the lever added to the market economy. On the Internet, everyone's potential is stimulated at almost zero cost.

Shandong's Guo Youcai became very popular. Internet celebrities from all walks of life flocked to the open space in front of Zibo Station overnight. They performed desperately. Some performed ugly, some performed wild, giving people visual and auditory shocks. It made me realize that the market economy plus the Internet has completely broken the shackles of standardized education.

Those who use standardized education as an indicator to judge that Chinese people are not free are actually not free themselves, and their souls are not free. They subconsciously do not have the ability to seek truth from facts. They say they are afraid of standard answers, but in fact they have already regarded everything in the West as standard answers. They are the kind of people they hate.

When standardized education meets the market economy and the Internet, Chinese people have two things at the same time: the safety of the back of the knife and the sharpness of the blade, the thickness of the back of the knife and the dexterity of the blade. Just like the yin and yang fish in the Tai Chi diagram.

The three most powerful populations on the earth today. The Ansas, the Jews, and the Chinese. The Ansas have ruled the earth for 400 years, from Britain to the United States, but the Jews and the Chinese have continued undefeated for thousands of years. The history of the Jews is in the Old Testament and in the Talmud. The veins of the Chinese are in the Book of Changes and the Eight Diagrams and in Laozi's Analects.

The Jews and the Chinese are two extremes. The Jews are a trading nomadic culture, they belong to the ocean. The Chinese are an agricultural and settled culture, we belong to the land. So today the Jews sail far away, form an alliance with the Ansas, and even kidnap the Ansas, while the Chinese compete with the Ansas in their own territory.

There are ten thousand angles to explain how the Jews are so powerful, and the final foothold is on one fact. Page of Google is Jewish, Zuckerberg of Facebook is Jewish, Thiel, the boss of PayPal and the incubator of Trump's successor Vance, is Jewish, Altman and Sutskevi of OpenAI are Jewish, Ellison, who is going to help OpenAI build the Stargate, is Jewish, and 20% of Ivy League schools are Jewish. All the strength of Jews lies in this origin, they cultivate geniuses.

A friend who has been overseas for a long time said that Jews and Chinese have a very similar point, they attach great importance to education, and they are both tiger parents. But Jews are open-minded, they value learning practical skills the most, they question, and then come up with new things. The Chinese value standard knowledge the most, and seek a position in a stable system. Standard knowledge is the ladder to climb up in this system.

The openness of Jews comes from the Mediterranean. This place at the junction of the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa to the west of the Mediterranean is a place of war without natural barriers. They must survive in the never-ending collision and even killing between people. Order is accidental and chaos is inevitable.

At the same time, Chinese people lived in the East Asian continent surrounded by the sea, plateau, tropical jungle and Gobi Desert. In this closed space, a great unification was inevitable. The first element of great unification was to ensure stability. From the imperial examination to standardized education, they were all tools to maintain stability and unification. They were all forced by survival, and the nature of the Chinese people went to the opposite of the Jews.

So Thiel commented on Ultraman that there was no place in the world where he could feel completely at home. And Graham said that if Ultraman was airdropped to an island of cannibals, he would become king in five years. This is a Jew in his bones.

Liang Wenfeng was born in Guangdong and went to college in Zhejiang, which is a coastal area with developed business, but after graduating from college, he chose the opposite direction. He did not go to sea or stay in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, but went to the inland, a residential building in a basin with a strong living atmosphere. Maybe the gene of agricultural civilization is calling us to return to the soil and absorb nutrients thoroughly.

The turning point was in 1840, when the closedness of the East Asian continent was inevitably pierced by the sharpness of the Mediterranean. In the following 100 years, the closed side had to absorb the nutrients of openness in order to survive, so there was a market economy and the Internet, and they internalized openness as a part of themselves. So today, Chinese people have both strict fathers and kind mothers, some say no, and some say yes. The yin and yang fish in the Tai Chi diagram are perfectly embodied today.

China's digital heroes emerge in an endless stream, and their fundamental vitality and fundamental operating system lies in the fact that they must be people with free souls. He sees the charm of the distance, but he can also see the thickness of the land under his feet. He is neither conservative nor blindly obedient. Only in this way can he live himself into the totem of Tai Chi.

Although Liang Wenfeng's scenery today is ten times that of Zhang Yiming, his troubles in the future may also be ten times. Algorithms create information cocoons, but they may be far less than the invisible control of AI over people.

Technical elites are always obsessed with equal rights in technology, and Liang Wenfeng is no exception. Deepseek achieves the strongest reasoning ability at 1/20 of the cost, accelerating the popularization of AI capabilities. But the popularization of technical power will inevitably lead to the popularization of corruption.

When the microphone is only in the hands of a few people, even if a few people are corrupt, they are supervised by the majority. If you give the microphone to everyone, no one will be supervised, and the majority will poison the majority every day, entering a mob society.

So one day you hand over a super weapon like AGI to everyone, either that will be an era a hundred times more chaotic than today, or you will anesthetize and control them at the source of AGI, and that will be an era of zombies.

After mechanical power, the bodies of most people become weak. After technology and the market bring convenience, most people become impatient. After AGI brings intelligence, most people will become even more stupid, and become arrogant because of their stupidity.

In Western legends, humans wanted to build the Tower of Babel and be equal to God. But God changed the language of humans, and they could not communicate with each other, so they dispersed and the Tower of Babel collapsed.

Today's technology is the Tower of Babel for humans. They want to be omnipotent and want to create intelligence. But the information cocoon formed by algorithms has torn humans apart. People can't communicate with each other, and everyone is struggling. When AGI replaces humans and domesticates humans, humans will enter the "capability cocoon". All the abilities that people think they have are illusory, and they all become puppets of AGI. At that time, it is not people who are torn apart, but people who are torn apart from themselves.

When AGI inevitably comes, Sutskevi's "super alignment" should be the only solution to save mankind. My understanding of super alignment is to express the principles of "good people are smarter" and "altruism gives rise to wisdom" in mathematics.

The meta-rule of robots envisioned by Westerners is that machines can never harm humans and can never sit idly by and watch humans being harmed. But this is just wishful mechanical thinking, because Hitler-style humans can change the rules themselves. Also, since people know that rules are meant to be broken, when machines are smarter than humans, they also know it.

The ultimate reliance can only be "good people are smarter." It is the natural laws and human laws that have been written into every inch of time and space at that origin, just as Pangu in the East created the world and God in the West created the world. Only by solidifying it into an algorithm that can be operated by humans can we ensure that the strongest power must be the power of kindness. If this is achieved, it will be a truly epic turning point.