What Did BlueRun Ventures and Volcano Engine Cook Up Together? | Event Recap

On May 15, BlueRun Ventures | Buming Entrepreneurship Camp and Volcano Engine | V-START Accelerator co-hosted the "AI Frontier, ATRenew — Intelligent Agents and Multimodal Industry Forum," focusing on the technical evolution and entrepreneurial practice of intelligent agents and multimodal AI.

This was a curated industry forum co-created by one of China's largest early-stage funds and its most advanced AI major. The participants included frontline staff from multiple ByteDance business lines — such as Seed, Lark, Dreamina, Trae, and Volcano Engine — as well as multiple BlueRun Ventures portfolio companies in the AI space — such as Yuaiweiwu, Muyan Zhiyu, VITURE, and RockFlow. The event also attracted guest speakers from star companies including Zhipu AI and Yingmo Technology.

The venue, originally set up for 80 seats, was packed to capacity with nearly 140 attendees from AI startups and ByteDance. Most were founders or C-level executives of startups, along with ByteDance algorithm and product experts, who engaged in in-depth discussions during the free talk sessions.

Terry Zhu, Managing Partner of BlueRun Ventures, and Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, delivered opening remarks. Zhu stated that the BlueRun Ventures team has maintained ongoing exchanges with cutting-edge scenarios at leading tech companies, and expressed delight in this collaboration with Volcano Engine, a ByteDance subsidiary. "The triple wave of AGI + 3D interaction + Robotics will be the core of the next 10-20 year technology cycle," he said. BlueRun Ventures treats AI as an absolute strategic priority and has made systematic deployments from AI foundation models to AI applications. This year, the AI industry has gradually moved beyond old paradigms and opened new windows, and BlueRun Ventures looks forward to exploring these frontiers alongside entrepreneurs.

Terry Zhu, Managing Partner, BlueRun Ventures

The event coincided with the first anniversary of the Doubao large model launch. Over the past year, Volcano Engine's model call volume grew from 120 billion tokens per day to 12 trillion. Tan Dai noted that every major improvement in model capabilities unlocks many new scenarios, leading to explosive growth in usage. He highlighted multimodal reasoning as the next major breakthrough — once achieved, it will unlock many complex tasks previously impossible to handle. With the development of Agents, the way AI products are built is also changing: development must be AI-native for Agents. It's not just about stronger models; the entire development environment, underlying platforms, and toolchains must all come together to truly enable Agent deployment in more complex task scenarios.

Tan Dai, President, Volcano Engine

Following this, Wu Di, Head of Intelligent Algorithms at Volcano Engine, analyzed foundation model trends and deployment challenges. He proposed:

• If AGI truly represents a wave of technology large enough, its impact on industrial structure will be real and direct — over the next three to four years, some existing companies may be forced to transform or be displaced. And after five to six years, Volcano Engine's most promising customers will likely come from startups and small teams that are still in early stages today.

• Three important changes will emerge in 2025: thinking models with multimodal understanding capabilities, improvements in video generation models, and the maturation of multi-step complex task capabilities. Visual understanding deserves particular attention — when models truly gain causal analysis capabilities for images and video, it will create unprecedented application opportunities. For text-to-video and image-to-video, a watershed moment may arrive in 2025, moving from "toy" to "usable." As for multi-step, complex-task Agents, the first "real scenario" deployment attempts may come in Q4 2025.

• Once C-end and B-end users begin accepting Tool-using and Agent systems, model call volume will rise rapidly — language and visual model token usage is expected to be more than 10 times current levels, further catalyzing an entirely new reinforcement learning market. The design of this round of reinforcement learning systems will be completely different from the pre-training era.

• A more fundamental shift is the paradigm transition: AI is evolving from "replacing tools" to "replacing services." Many service businesses previously reliant on processes, experience, and manual operations will be directly restructured by models with Agent capabilities. Experience-based moats will be broken, and work efficiency itself becomes the sole focus.

• The next two to three years represent the best window for AI application-focused startup teams — performance improvements, cost reductions, and platform concessions are happening simultaneously, providing small teams with trial-and-error space that only rarely becomes available.

Wu Di, Head of Intelligent Algorithms, Volcano Engine

At the event, Cao Wei, Partner at BlueRun Ventures, moderated the roundtable "AI Agent Exploration: Hardware and Software Driving Intelligent Emergence," delving into AI Agent deployment across different scenarios. Participants included Deng Fanxin, AI Tech Lead at Lark Base; Wang Lin, Co-founder of Yuaiweiwu; Yueguang Zhang, Founder of Muyan Zhiyu; Jiang Gonglue, Founder & CEO of VITURE; and Vakee, Founder & CEO of RockFlow. (Key takeaways from the forum will be published on the BlueRun Ventures WeChat official account.)

AI Agent Roundtable

Tao Yeliao, Investment Director at BlueRun Ventures, moderated the roundtable "Symphony of Multimodality: Decoding the Path of Technology and Product Advancement," focusing on multimodal technical breakthroughs and practical applications. Participants included Mei Yuan, Story Agent Product Lead at Dreamina; Sun Yi, Dreamina Strategy; Eddy, Product Director of Multimodal Models at Zhipu AI; Zhang Xinhao, Product Lead at a leading AI startup; and Zhang Qixuan, CTO of Yingmo Technology. (Key takeaways from the forum will be published on the BlueRun Ventures WeChat official account.)

Multimodal Roundtable

BlueRun Ventures is pleased to have co-created this forum of diverse perspectives with Volcano Engine, a ByteDance subsidiary — at this critical juncture of rapid technological evolution, confronting the industry's most pressing issues with high-quality discussion. Going forward, BlueRun Ventures will continue to pursue multi-dimensional collaboration with ByteDance to jointly advance the industry.

Amid the Intelligence Surge: BlueRun's AI Portfolio Companies Launch New Products Again! | BlueRun Family Headlines

AI is Calling, Pick Up | BlueRun is Hiring

What Was Said at Last Week's Hottest AI Hardware Salon in Shenzhen | Booming Hub Recap