2025 Kickoff Conversation: AI's Pivotal Year, the Dawn of the Agent Era | A Conversation with Yusen Dai of ZhenFund

The first week of 2025, and this episode is a special crossover between ZhenFund's podcast "Seriously Speaking" and "Crossroads." We invited our old friend Yusen Dai, managing partner at ZhenFund, to join us. We not only looked back at AI's rapid development over the past year, but also looked ahead to the major opportunities in AI entrepreneurship for 2025.

Standing at the start of 2025, both Yusen and I feel incredibly excited, convinced that we're living through an important moment in tech history. That excitement stems from two major events: the launch of Devin, and OpenAI's release of o3.

Because of this, we're greeting 2025 with full optimism, firmly believing this will be a year filled with hope.

Six months ago, on "Crossroads," Yusen used an analogy: large models were still elementary school students — you shouldn't rush to put them to work. Now, with the release of Devin, a truly usable Agent product, Yusen believes AI programming has completed an important evolution — from "I ask, you answer," to "I ask, you write," and now to "I ask, you do." This breakthrough represents not just major progress in AI programming, but also signals a wave of promising vertical AI entrepreneurship opportunities.

💚 Wishing everyone a happy new year, filled with love and hope.

🟢 Part 1 - 2024

03:19 One word to describe the feeling of 2024: "Fast"

11:06 The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed

12:58 New requirements for AI application deployment: reduced hallucination, improved programming capabilities, computer use

15:35 Is AI the era of post-00s entrepreneurs? What do the new generation of founders have in common?

18:03 Progress in 2024 that exceeded expectations: pre-training hitting bottlenecks, accelerated Agent deployment, falling large model costs

21:50 New product forms will emerge from "reinforcement learning" and "context"

27:30 The four stages of AI programming development: ChatGPT → Github Copilot → Cursor → Devin

31:22 Why encourage AI going global? And who should go global?

33:45 Advice for Chinese entrepreneurs going global: figure out "what to do" + "how to promote"

🟢 Part 2 - 2025

38:02 Why is Devin so exciting?

41:37 What kind of future can we experience through Devin?

43:36 Characteristics of the new paradigm: asynchronous experience, cloud virtual machines, knowledge accumulation, task-based pricing

55:47 "Cursor is the programmer's Copilot; Devin is the boss's Scaling Law."

01:06:08 Staying optimistic about AI: people, models, products — PMF fit still requires patience

01:12:27 In 2025, which application directions are easier to deploy? Where are the boundaries of entrepreneurship?

01:18:16 A hopeful new wave of technology: Agent, scalable personalization, o3

01:31:08 What does the big opportunity for generative AI Native look like?

01:34:30 In 2025, investors' consensus and non-consensus

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