Ten Months to Break Even: An Experiment in Pricing and Restraint

First, this concession makes us happy internally; everyone is happy, employees feel a sense of achievement, and we gain cohesion. Moreover, this concession benefits society, and society is happy, as are other peers and ordinary people. So this restraint, I understand, can increase the probability of us achieving AGI in the long run.

When considering something, I have no doubt that AGI will have tremendous commercial value. On that basis, my priority is not how to increase my share or take more of the pie; my priority is how to increase the probability of success.

This restraint may also be reflected in many other aspects. For example, last Chinese New Year we suddenly had a lot of users, but we didn't pursue retaining them or monetizing them, nor did we try to seize commercial benefits from users. We didn't compete for users or make money, but we worked hard to serve them well. We never thought about building the next super app, competing with someone, or becoming the next ByteDance or Tencent. We had no such thoughts at all.

We could have done that, but we didn't. My understanding is that this is also part of restraint. You shouldn't think you have to monetize everything; just because you have users doesn't mean you'll become the next ByteDance and then gobble it up. I think that's commercially viable and possible. If last year we had spent a lot of money to compete with ByteDance for users, that would have been one approach. But we chose a very restrained approach: not competing for that, because there are watermelons ahead; what's in front might just be sesame seeds.

I shouldn't grab every sesame seed. Of course, some sesame might be big, but I think the AI ahead might dwarf everything before. In retrospect, it might have been right not to focus on the consumer side last year. Because we can see there really are bigger watermelons ahead; what's in front are just small sesame seeds.

If I had a lot of money last year and scaled this thing up big, what would be the benefit? You wouldn't gain anything. Those are my real thoughts, because I think the AGI opportunity ahead is huge, always huge. I don't even need to consider whether I'll have a position or what my business model will be. We don't need to consider that at all. As long as there's such a big commercial opportunity, you'll find a way. As for the sesame seeds ahead, we'll pick them up, but just casually, not stopping or treating it as important.

So last year's consumer-side daily active users and such, I think it's just a small thing. But we picked them up, maintaining user usage at a relatively low cost, because it might be useful later. Although we don't know what use these users will be now, it's a pure cost, but it might be useful in the future.

Since it's something we can pick up effortlessly, we'll do so. Looking at this year, it's very likely that we have an opportunity for ARR revenue from API or AI. If demand continues to expand, and we can buy more GPUs, then achieving hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR is quite possible. If AI can reach a billion dollars, then our company's cash flow could basically break even, covering our R&D expenses and all costs. So that's possible, but we're not prioritizing it.

We will do this, but I think it's an important thing. It's not our top priority or what we truly care about today. Bigger opportunities lie ahead. The opportunities in front include last year's consumer side and this year's enterprise side. I think we should do them and do them well, but they are not our goal. Or rather, most people in our company don't consider this a very important matter, not as important as AGI.

I can say more about open source, because many previous questions were about it. First, I think we will open source, and our strongest model may also be open source. Because I don't see any benefit to closed source, no inevitable advantage. ByteDance's model is closed source; what benefit does it have? I don't see any.

Even if the model is open source and you tell others everything, the barrier is still very high. For others to use it, the barrier is very high. It's hard for them to use it; secondly, to use it and keep costs low is also very, very difficult, not easy.

It's not that once I open source, others can easily achieve the same deployment cost as me. There's still a lot of work to do. Even though the working principles are understood, not every company is willing or has the will and capability to organize manpower to achieve that goal.

I'm used to that. It might not be good at doing this because the resistance is too great. Controlling costs is hard; there are many managerial and physical constraints. That's also the advantage of a startup: if a startup is too small, it doesn't have the power to do this; if you're a large company, it's hard to organize.