- In another interview from January 2024, Xiao openly admits that he didn’t initially believe in AI’s potential, and “remained cautious” despite the hype surrounding GPT-3.5 in the fall of 2022. He describes coming to two conclusions about AI investment, which eventually led him to focus on AI products as opposed to chasing AGI with foundational model research:
“First, I wouldn’t consider working on big models without sufficient business scale. Second, I believe that in China, big model services will eventually integrate fully with cloud computing. I’ve discussed this with our CTO and believe that cloud computing companies will provide customized deployment services, so we don’t need to dive into that ourselves.”
…
“I focused more on what big models could do, and what kind of applications I could build with them. In the beginning, many people were financing based on concepts, but by the second half of the year, both domestic and international, there was much less of that. Everyone was returning to business rationality, focusing on finding PMF (Product-Market Fit). By February of 2023, I had a conversation with an investor focused on big models, and no matter how I asked, they refused to talk about products. They weren’t discussing technology or plans. By March, the product’s valuation plummeted. People realized that simply building a single application based on big models might not work, and that’s when the consensus started forming: either focus on technological breakthroughs or work on relatively closed-loop application scenarios.” View Highlight 2025-03-10
- This business-minded pragmatism shines through in Xiao’s vision for the future — instead of techno-optimist visions of AI-powered drug discoveries or a moon colony staffed by robots, he imagines a world where humanity can return to a glorious past:
“I think that the white-collar lifestyle may be a detour for mankind. If you look at it in terms of a curve or over a longer period, say thousands of years, or even the ten-thousand-year span of human history — it’s actually quite rare for people to sit in one place and engage in intense mental work without much physical activity. This is probably only a phenomenon of the past hundred years.
For a longer time in history, maintaining physical health and developing spiritual civilization have gone hand in hand. In ancient times, people also needed spiritual and cultural development, but that involved physical labor as well, which helped strengthen their bodies.
In the past hundred years, however, issues like View Highlight 2025-03-20 See also: bestill ecology-of-technology
