Vision and Original Intent: Why We Have No Organization, Only Vision

Along with our other colleagues at the company, when we first started this company, our original intent wasn't about how much money we would eventually make, going to the capital markets, going public, or anything like that. We didn't have that intent. The initial dozens of people never thought that way. If they had, they wouldn't have come.

So overall, we approached this with great goodwill towards the world, and we felt this was useful for humanity-something beyond money. Of course, later on, when it became clear that the potential benefits were huge, other temptations arose-that's a separate matter. But our starting intent, our vision, and the vision we maintain to this day are not about maximizing commercial interests. I think that's a key point.

About twenty years ago, the person I admired most in management was Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE. Looking back now, much of what he said may no longer be correct, but he got one crucial thing right: the most important thing for a company is its vision. Managing a large company doesn't rely on rules and regulations; it relies on vision. What is vision? Vision is not a slogan on the wall; vision is what you do, not what you say-it's how you actually operate. Anyway, I forget Jack Welch's exact words, but that's roughly the idea.

So, how do we manage so many people and how are we organized? Actually, we have no organization; it's vision-driven. We organize around a vision. We have no organization. This has both advantages and disadvantages. In the future, we will find ways to leverage the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses, but this is our characteristic. We don't operate with a 'what KPI to achieve' or 'no assessment' approach; we only have vision.

This vision isn't even written down; it hasn't been put into words. The vision lies in the way we do things and our attitude towards the world. Perhaps each person in our company understands the vision differently, and each individual's vision may differ, but they align in a broad direction. I think it's still about having great goodwill towards the world and wanting to do something. That's how we organize.

Next, I'll speak first, and after I finish, everyone can ask questions. I'll probably talk about what follows around this vision. This vision is real, not made up. We truly think this way and act this way. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to explain many of our actions.

Why does this vision drive us to insist on open source? Because the vision itself requires open source. Without this vision, you can't organize people. For example, Zhipu also open-sources, but Zhipu's open source is different from ours. Zhipu's open source feels forced; they feel it's not their original intent, but for us, it is our original intent.

And on the matter of open source, we were very clear from the start. First, the vision; second, we believe that to make AI work commercially, open source is beneficial. This may sound contradictory and counterintuitive, because historically open source and commercialization have been in conflict. But I think AI is different. Historically, a software company's market might be a few billion dollars a year; if it goes open source, that market disappears, maybe leaving only tens or hundreds of millions.

But AI is huge enough; eventually it might account for, say, ten percent of human society's GDP. That's a really large number. One person can't monopolize this; you have to share with others, otherwise you definitely won't survive. This is different from open-sourcing a software in the past, because the market for that software wasn't that big. But AI is simply too big. If we try to monopolize the benefits, we will surely be abandoned by history. I think fundamentally this is an objective law, a view of history.

It's not that if I don't open source, I can monopolize the market; that doesn't align with objective reality. You will certainly face a lot of resistance, and there will be other ways to prevent you from achieving that goal. Under these circumstances, I think we don't necessarily have to follow traditional business thinking. You need a mechanism to ensure that the benefits you can obtain are limited, then you might succeed. Restraint is needed, I think restraint is necessary.

If we want to make AI happen in our hands, first and foremost, I think restraint is needed. You can't think that a certain percentage of humanity's GDP or China's GDP will all belong to me. The more you think that way, the less likely you are to succeed.

So from the very beginning, we felt the need for restraint. The more restrained you are, the more likely you are to succeed in this matter. This is a commercial consideration, of course a macro-level one. I think this is intuitive, at least to me, or at least I genuinely believe it. We don't have many other advantages; we are not particularly talented, we are not wealthier than others, nor do we have better people than other companies-we really don't. Two years ago when we founded this company, we didn't have much money, didn't have many GPUs, no reputation, no influence-we were just a group of very ordinary people.