Author丨 Huang Zezheng.
Editor丨Zhang Lijuan
Recently, I have been studying with Yu Minhong as a teacher, learning how to be an Internet celebrity. At the Yabuli Entrepreneur Summit some time ago, Zhou Hongyi faced the camera, found Yu Minhong with a wine glass, and said that he planned to worship Yu Minhong as a teacher.
And now it is not difficult to guess that Mr. Yu Minhong, who was born in education and cares about education, estimated that the trick for Zhou Hongyi was: "Old Zhou, if you want to be an Internet celebrity, you have to start a class, and there will be traffic ...... in class."”
Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why Zhou Hongyi, who was worth more than 80 billion yuan, quickly opened his first "AI free class" after the Yabuli Entrepreneur Summit. Especially at the moment when Dr. Li Yizhou of Tsinghua University has been criticized by the whole network for selling AI training courses.
What's even more interesting is that another star AI entrepreneur, Mobvoi founder Li Zhifei, also started selling AI courses almost at the same time. The annual membership price of Li Zhifei's AI course is as high as 2999 yuan.
On Douyin, paid courses around AI have begun to blow out, including AI live streaming, AI training, AI cognition, AI practice, and AI design-related courses, with prices ranging from 148 yuan to 2999 yuan. A course priced at 499 yuan, called "From Beginner to Proficient - AI Practical Application Course", has reached 64 sales on the Douyin platform in the past 30 days alone60,000, and the conversion rate of the live broadcast room is close to 14%.
Why are AI celebrity entrepreneurs preaching the unlimited potential of generative AI as the future while relying on AI to become Internet celebrities? From the perspective of the small dining table, it is not just to earn a meager class fee, but the bigger factor is that everyone needs AI to become hotter ......
Question the influencer and become an influencer.
In the public impression, technology and Internet celebrities have always been two parallel lines on the same plane. The reason is that if you want to become an Internet celebrity, you must have a beautiful appearance, a sweet voice, the ability to play memes, a unique job that can be displayed, etc., one of many skills.
It's just that the characteristics of these Internet celebrities happen to be inconsistent with the image and temperament of calm and introverted technology practitioners. It wasn't until Musk's appearance that the world realized that the original "tech Internet celebrity" could really work.
And in the field of generative AI, it is obvious that the first Internet celebrity to come out of the circle is Li Yizhou. Although he was criticized by the whole network for "false propaganda and the course is very watery", Li Yizhou did become popular with the label of "AI Internet celebrity", and his popularity is not the same as before.
In fact, retrospectively, the topic of AI Internet celebrities cutting leeks is not new. Compared with the strength of foreign Internet celebrities to cut leeks with the help of AI, Li Yizhou can only be regarded as a small thing.
Back in 2016, when the first wave of AI was on the rise, an Indian-American Siraj R**al used AI to become an internet celebrity on YouTube.
According to Hillaget's self-introduction on his YouTube channel, he is "Bill Nye (a famous American science educator and TV host) in computer science, Kanye (a famous American rapper) in the * world, Beyoncé in neural networks, Bolt in the learning world, and Jesus ...... in machine learning."”
With a handful of white hair, exaggerated body movements, and a self-proclaimed "mission is to spread data science", he has attracted nearly 1 million fans. And Hillaj also soon launched a paid AI course, priced at $199, or about 1,432 yuan. The course was an instant hit, with more than 1,200 people paying for it.
Although the course is advertised, Hilakijah said that he will provide "personalized learning and assistance" to the participants. But in fact, he just released 30 minutes of ** lessons every week and gave everyone a period of Q&A.
Some of the students who paid quickly felt cheated and demanded a refund, but Hilakijah simply ignored the request for a refund, and on YouTube and Twitter, whenever someone mentioned the refund of the tuition fee, Hilaki would block the ...... directly
Despite all the criticism, it turns out that when one Hiraj fell, thousands of them stood up.
Today, a few years later, AI has become popular again, and it is not only AI concept stocks that are on fire, but also a number of AI Internet celebrities. On Douyin, not only AI topics frequently detonate hot searches, but also paid courses around AI have expanded to multiple subdivisions.
For example, AI science popularization, AI practice, and AI design related courses; AI Content Marketing for TOB Customers; Live classes using AI to bring goods, etc., are all available.
Li Yizhou, who has a Dr. Tsinghua persona, sold about 250,000 sets of the AI course "Everyone's Artificial Intelligence Lesson" in one year, with sales of about 50 million.
At the same time, the small dining table noticed that even if there is no endorsement from AI bosses, a course priced at 1498 yuan, titled "From 0 Basic to Advanced, AI Business Design System Course", has also sold 700,000 in sales in the past 30 days, and it is roughly estimated that there will be 8 million sales a year.
Considering the verbal and written criticism of Li Yizhou's AI course on the whole network, as well as the reports on the false propaganda of the AI course, this sales volume is already considerable.
No wonder Zhou Hongyi explained on Douyin: "A certain Tsinghua doctor was 'flattened' for selling AI courses, which at least shows that everyone is eager to learn AI knowledge." Since everyone wants to learn, I just have a free public class ......It is worth mentioning that at present, Zhou Hongyi has put this ** at the top.
Questioning Internet celebrities and becoming Internet celebrities", just when everyone was worried that their careers would be replaced by AI, Internet celebrities have taken advantage of this FOMO sentiment and took the lead in eating dividends.
The purpose of the class is to make AI hotter.
Of course, whether it is Zhou Hongyi, who offers free public classes, or Li Zhifei, who charges 2,999 yuan for a one-year course, it is definitely not the class fee that cares. After all, even now Zhou Hongyi's 360 market value is 68.9 billion, and his worth is more than 15.5 billion yuan; After Li Zhifei's Mobvoi completed the D-2 round of financing, its post-investment valuation also reached 7$5.7 billion.
For the two business tycoons, the small amount of money from selling classes is really insignificant, or a drop in the bucket. For founders who want to use generative AI to build a bigger future for their companies, it's more like a course — to make AI hotter.
Isn't generative AI hot enough? Abroad, it's hot enough, at home, it's not hot enough.
To cite a few of the most intuitive data, OpenAI's valuation has soared to $86 billion; From the beginning of last year to this year, Nvidia has risen by more than 250%, with a market value of more than $2 trillion, becoming the world's third largest company. Microsoft's market capitalization has also soared by 60% in the past year, reaching a market value of $3 trillion, briefly surpassing Apple to become the world's largest company in terms of market capitalization; Meta has also swept away the decline in the past 12 months, with its market capitalization soaring 168%, returning to the trillion-dollar level.
Behind all these drastic changes in market capitalization, AI has played a key role.
It is no wonder that Apple officially announced that it would give up making cars and move to the AI battlefield, and Google was also led by the CEO himself, elevating AI to the company's strategic level. Because everyone realizes that whether generative AI is the future of humanity or not, at least for the time being, it will largely determine the future of tech giants.
Are domestic tech giants enjoying the dividends of generative AI? Obviously there is, but it's still not enough.
Take the most aggressive approach to AI as an example, according to the latest financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2023. In 2023, the total revenue will reach 134.6 billion yuan, and the attributable net profit will be 28.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth rate of 39%; The revenue in the fourth quarter was 35 billion yuan, and the attributable net profit was 7.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 44%.
Robin Li, Founder, Chairman and CEO, said: "Building generative AI and large language models has become the new growth engine and has driven long-term growth. ”
Although the growth is remarkable, compared with the growth rate of hundreds of billions of dollars by foreign AI giants such as Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta, the dividends they have eaten are really difficult to compare.
After all, according to Robin Li, Wenxin Yiyan is the closest to GPT-4, and it has been sharpened for ten years and invested tens of billions of dollars, and because of this, there is actually a lot of reason to expect generative AI to bring better returns to the company.
Even so, other companies that claim to be "all in AI" can be imagined. According to a semiconductor investor, "There are already AI startups that are trying to improve the Nvidia graphics card, the reason is the actual income brought by AI, and it is better to directly resell the second-hand graphics card." ”
In addition to passively reselling graphics cards, it is obviously a more positive way to make the market hotter and make the cake bigger. After all, only when the cake is bigger, the entrants are more likely to profit from it.
From this point of view, the so-called establishment of AI courses is only a means to further heat up the AI market, but not the ultimate goal. In the past year, there have been endless AI science popularization**, AI summits, AI theme forums, AI introductory books, AI podcasts and other content forms, the cost of AI courses is not critical, the key is to help C-end users tighten the string of AI at all times, maintain FOMO sentiment, and the AI market can always be prosperous.
Just as influencers need to be updated all the time to keep it fresh and maintain their followers. At a time when the playability and practicality of AI are not enough to attract people's attention for a long time, it is necessary for AI practitioners to use AI to play all kinds of tricks and maintain market heat.
To put it another way, in 2017, Google explained Transformer with an article titled "Attention is all you need". And by 2024, AI Internet celebrities will use the way of opening classes to attract attention (attention), and it seems that they are also practicing Transformer with practical actions.