Where Are the AIGC Startup Opportunities? Four Chinese Founders Discuss Technology, Controversy, and Implementation

Everyone is talking about AIGC. In September 2022, a work titled Space Opera created with the AI drawing tool Midjourney won first prize in an art competition and sparked controversy; at the same time, multiple AIGC platforms including Stable Diffusion, Copy.ai, and Jasper.ai announced funding, and several unicorn companies emerged in a short period.^[5]

But AIGC also faces many commercial and technical controversies: issues around copyright, quality rates, and industry standards for content itself; ethical challenges in technology; and the possibility that computing power may be concentrated among leading large companies. It is still unclear where future new opportunities lie.^[5]

Many reports focus on AIGC startup developments abroad, with little coverage of the domestic sector. Founder Park invited several entrepreneurs in China's AIGC field for a roundtable discussion. Participants included Li Jingmei, partner and chief product officer of Langboat Technology; Yu Jia, partner and COO of Westlake Xinchen; Zhang Tao, founder and CEO of Digital Force Technology; and Zhang Shiying, founder and CEO of ZMO.AI.^[5]

On the technology side, Li Jingmei said that large models should strictly speaking be called pretrained models. Their lineage can be traced back to Google's Transformer technology proposed in 2017, followed by models such as BERT, T5, and OpenAI GPT-3, as well as pretrained models launched by Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and others. She noted that in 2019, machine AI's reading comprehension level had already surpassed that of humans.^[5]

During the same period, Founder Park's Founder 100 series also interviewed several frontier technology entrepreneurs. The Mijia Glasses Camera raised more than 10 million yuan in crowdfunding, ranking No. 1 among Xiaomi ecological chain product crowdfunding campaigns in 2022; Xia Yongfeng, founder of Honeycomb Technology, called it the best current AR glasses solution since Google Glass was released 10 years earlier, and emphasized that three functions—a good enough camera, optical engine, and all-in-one device—constitute a minimum viable model.^[1]

In a more segmented smart glasses scenario, Guangli Technology launched Holoswim2 smart swimming goggles, combining the functions of traditional swimming goggles and a waterproof watch to monitor swimming posture and various body data in real time while users swim. Founder Zhang Zhuopeng said there are at least 630 million swimming enthusiasts worldwide, and believes that migrating the current era's mostly 2D content onto glasses can already achieve a huge leap.^[3]

In addition, Xingqi World tries to turn FPV drones into tech trend toys. Founder Zhang Zinan said beginners can basically get the hang of it within one to two batteries' time, or within ten minutes; the aircraft's structural design focuses on survivability, and after hitting a wall it can flip over and continue flying.^[2] Zhang Liang, founder of SphereEx, believes that the era of database fragmentation is inevitable, the boundaries between open-source projects and commercial projects are clear, and open source itself is a belief as well as a business model choice, with no distinction of superior or inferior relative to closed source.^[4] Li Nan, founder of Angry Miao, launched a TWS earphone starting at 2,200 yuan, aimed at PC or console gamers, focusing on the Generation Z stay-at-home desktop scenario, and believes traditional headphone giants have ignored this scenario.^[6]

These interviews cover directions including AIGC, AR glasses, AR swimming goggles, open-source databases, drone trend toys, and desktop audio. The common thread is that entrepreneurs are all looking for more specific scenarios and a longer-term market.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}