Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI
A-share AI concept stocks are rising in a straight line, technology giants bring capital into the group and become billions of RMB unicorns in minutes, Internet giants are scrambling to enter the game, the government continues to introduce various support policies, and the media is always a trillion-dollar outlet. It is difficult to recruit AIGC talents with an annual salary of 5 million...
Since 2022, the wave of technology entrepreneurship brought about by ChatGPT is sweeping China just like the sandstorm a few days ago. Entrepreneurs, investors, workers, people who eat melons...all of them are involved.
Is AIGC really that easy to attract money? Are first-line entrepreneurs doing well? Is there any difficulty?
We interviewed several front-line practitioners and found that it is one thing to know how well you are warm and the industry is hot, but it is actually difficult to start a real business. For example, investors' money is not easy to get, the commercialization scene has just begun to emerge, and the seed users are not very large. More core, AIGC is very popular, but not many people know it, and "market education" is imminent...
But there is one point, AIGC entrepreneurs are very, very excited, and experienced practitioners said: AIGC has inspired 20 The kind of excitement that gave him when the Internet first emerged years ago, he stayed up all night, always feeling that he had to do something.
01
AIGC's entrepreneurship, in front of capital, "applause but not success"
Puhua Capital divides AIGC investment into application layer, model layer, and basic layer.
The basic layer includes computing power, data, etc., which are guarded by traditional enterprises, and new players are basically unable to enter.
The large model has high value content and attracts the most attention. From the perspective of Internet investment and financing, from application to infrastructure, the lower the technology content, the more profitable it is. For example, the water seller Nvidia has already "earned hemp". But there are giants here, the competition is extremely fierce, and the funds, resources, and talents are involved...
"The large model is deeply rooted and does not require independent applications. It is a basic capability, just like Android in the mobile phone field. It can link to other applications. Large models can even be applied by the way, like Midjourney. Objectively speaking, large models need hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in this way.” A practitioner told Babbitt.
Completely different from the big model, the application layer is less imaginative, and the capital requirements are clearer: feasible business models, application scenarios, economies of scale, number of users, and even revenue.
The views of most interviewees are very unified: the market can listen to the story told by the big model, and give a lot of patience to cultivate, but the application project does not have this treatment, it is very direct, and it depends on the "curative effect". The problem is that the AIGC application is crossing the river by feeling the stones, not to mention the business model, and the application scenarios may not work well. As a result, there are many interested investment institutions for application projects, but very few investors who actually place bets.
Excluding survivor bias, according to interviews and public information, AIGC has a high voice in public opinion, but it is very difficult to get money.
Xiong Weiming of Huachuang Capital also expressed his helplessness to the media. Five colleagues were looking at the large model and AIGC, but none of them made a move. "Entrepreneurship projects directly call the computing power of ChatGPT through API, and make some applications based on it. This kind of company can do some business and make money in a short period of time, but it does not have its own algorithm, computing power and model, and there is no actual innovation. It is easy to be replaced, and it is not worth investing in."
This very typical view has "the market is huge", but it is also dissed by many entrepreneurs on social media: the logic of the Internet should not be used to apply AIGC.
02
AIGC's first killer application is likely to be AI painting, and paid companies have come out
In the AIGC application track, the mature, out-of-the-box, and "capable" AI painting is undoubtedly the AI painting, that is, Wen Shengtu. Its ultra-low threshold allows everyone to become a painting expert.
The track is extremely crowded. Overseas top-tier projects have swept the global market; Netease, Tencent, and Meitu have turned it into a function in an APP. Small and medium-sized entrepreneurial projects have sprung up like mushrooms after rain.
Zhao Jiecheng is a member of this industry. He described the changes in the AI painting market in the past year.
Before 2023, if you take the initiative to discuss cooperation with relevant companies with a plan, it is easy to be rejected. After 2023, some well-known companies, even listed companies, began to approach their door and cut straight to the point: what can AIGC do for me? How to empower the original business?
"Now, many people take the initiative to add WeChat, but they are not very familiar with the capabilities of AIGC. I want to tell them, but I really don't have time to do science." Zhao Jiecheng said, "We need to choose among those who understand AIGC. What to do, what can I do, I will try to cooperate with you.”
AI painting may have the greatest impact on the original post art design, some typical cases come from game companies, cutting 50% or 60%. You know, in a game company with 30,000 people, maybe 8,000 people are art designers.
The work task of art design is probably to visualize creative content according to planning needs, such as logos, characters, weapons... This kind of art and creative positions were originally considered by the industry to be the last high ground captured by AI. knocked out.
"It's meaningless." A practitioner lamented the fall of the painting industry (non-art creation) in Xiaohongshu, "Don't learn to paint anymore." Enterprises are more anxious than workers, worrying about falling behind and being eliminated by the market
. Therefore, although the popularity of AI painting lies in the explosion of C-end users, for entrepreneurs, it seems that the B-end market is the main battlefield, and some "novel" models are being developed.
Unbounded AI is the forerunner of this track. It is reported that the current network covers more than 2 million users, and was recently selected into the list of China's 50 most concerned AIGC companies released by Qubit.
From its official website, it can be found that the C-end revenue model is already very rich, including pay-per-view, one-click the same style, the use of theme models, and possible membership value-added models. According to its CTO Zhang Feibiao, "AIGC has a great impact on all walks of life. Creative reference, efficiency improvement, content production, auxiliary creation... are of great value. It can be applied in automobiles, home design, games, comics and other fields. C End users can be described as enthusiastic, while B-end enterprises are in a hurry to empower themselves with AIGC.” What the
public sees more is that a large number of companies use AIGC for advertising and marketing, but from the feedback of front-line practitioners, AIGC is The ability to solve specific problems after landing in specific production links is very strong, and some models have already emerged.
"AI painting cannot completely replace human labor, but even if the human input is reduced by 20%, companies will flock to it." However, the transformation of the B-side has received very little media attention.
"I have been asked by investors that what you are doing is too thin and has no barriers, which is suitable for business, but I don't think so. If I can superimpose multiple systems in a complete closed-loop business logic, let the system The logic of nesting and coupling between them seems to be able to thicken the commercial barriers. Simply put, I want to give a whole set of solutions.” AIGC entrepreneur Wang Heng said, this is what he thinks after a long time, AIGC’s entrepreneurship moat.
After the interview, providing targeted solutions is a common way for many AIGC entrepreneurs to start the B-end market.
03
Can the "small model" of the industry become a moat for entrepreneurship?
There are many opinions that AIGC is winner-take-all, and even overseas large-scale models eat up most of the market, and small and medium-sized entrepreneurs have little chance. But through interviews we found that the opposite was the case.
Former NetEase, ByteDance engineer, AIGC entrepreneur "Ma Xiaoqui's myth" has a very "market" point of view: application layer entrepreneurship is not for AIGC and AIGC, but for in-depth understanding of needs and scenarios, and thickening the product itself , AIGC does addition, through the new interaction logic and paradigm, improves the operation mode, and greatly improves the product experience.
"At present, the big opportunities are mature products, such as Office, Notion, etc., with the help of AIGC to transform existing products. Are there any new opportunities? Of course, we need to explore more vertical fields, such as law, cross-border e-commerce, etc. "He said, "Everyone is adjusting the interface, and the technical barriers are low, so you have to figure out where the product barriers are. Is it product experience? Data loop? Operation means? User community? The overall strength of the team. There are many ideas, but few are reliable and feasible, and even fewer can be made and done well.”
There is a saying in the AIGC circle: “Technology is only a pass line, which proves that you can go to the poker table.” Practitioners of AIGC are worried about the anxiety brought about by the rapid iteration of technology, but more people believe that AIGC's natural open source culture and technical barriers are not a problem. on the same starting line.
Unbounded AI CTO Zhang Feibiao told Babbitt that the industry-specific model is a hard technology to build a moat for entrepreneurial projects. In Wujie AI, it has provided more than 30 theme models such as color man, Guofeng, Meiman, Xianxia and so on. Taking Xianxia as an example, the user enters the prompt words on the screen, such as: a person is running, and the final picture will be a Xianxia-style character running. This is much more efficient and simpler than users groping for Xianxia style on large models such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.
Ma Qianli, the co-founder of Unbounded AI, also mentioned that there is no conflict between product innovation and embracing the Stable Diffusion (SD) ecology. SD only helps build a prototype from 0-1. At the application level, entrepreneurs can still make differentiation.
"We are now developing the national style model. The bottom layer of this model must have a large amount of national style data, such as Chinese faces, eyes, Hanfu and other materials. The details are ghosts. Whoever trains this subdivision model with rich details will be Can have the differentiation of the bottom layer.”
The possible breakthrough of this kind of entrepreneurial project is also reflected in the model for the B-end market. Automatically complete home improvement design? Zhang Feibiao's answer is absolutely possible, and they are already doing joint model training with such companies.
This is like a strategy: apply large models to specific scenarios to solve specific problems, build small models, then accumulate enough data, evolve and iterate step by step, and finally feed back and give birth to large models.
There is even a view that in the future each industry will have its own industry model, and each enterprise will have its own business model. The sales model will become a new business model.
There are as many industries and enterprises as there are opportunities for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs.
04
The Power of Open Source—Small Companies Have the Courage to Resist Giants
"The giants are always obsessed with the old era, the business model of the old era, and the thinking mode of the old era, but AIGC's entrepreneurship is no longer the same as the Internet, such as who has deep barriers and who brings their own large models. Brand new things will be born here , You may not even be able to use the business model to characterize it.”
In the past month, the media reported on a large scale that Chinese Internet giants entered the large-scale model track.
"Large companies want to take everything in the industry chain. From computing power to models to applications, they have built a closed ecology. The competition of future models is not only the competition of technology, but the competition of ecology. Small companies are very It is easy to join a new ecology. But giants have to do it all over again. This will be a dilemma in path selection and a systematic failure.” Open
source, this is the core model of AIGC, especially in the field of AI painting, Stability.AI This is true of the open source ecology of Midjourney, the SaaS or Model Service ecology created by Midjourney.
Stable Diffusion allows ecological projects to grow through the open source model, which not only meets the long-tail market demand, but also strengthens itself, and the speed of progress is unimaginably fast. ControlNet, T2I-Adapter, Composer, and LoRA all ran out. In fact, many domestic AI painting projects also use SD's capabilities to build more applications.
Midjourney has almost become a representative project of AIGC technology productization. It will be established in August 2021 and beta tested one year later. Previously, the media reported that it has 11 full-time employees, over 10 million community members, and annual revenue of 100 million US dollars.
Together vertically and horizontally, entrepreneurs have the opportunity to stand on the same starting line as the giants. A highly experienced practitioner said: “AIGC arouses the feeling that everyone felt when the Internet was just emerging 20 years ago. Do something."
"The correct way is to do it, iterate first, and establish cognition and paradigm first. Don't be obsessed with the old era, and other things are not so important." A practitioner left a message immediately and got High praise.
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