The Sexiest AI Opportunities Are in Markets That Are "Slow, Expensive, and Fragmented" | A Conversation with Mizzen AI's Keqiang Sun & Yihao Li

🚥 This week on Crossing, we're thrilled to welcome Keqiang Sun, founder and CEO of Mizzen AI, a startup using AI to assist user research, along with his angel investor Yihao Li, partner at CreekStone.

Keqiang Sun is a computer vision PhD turned entrepreneur, and an irrepressible optimist who lives by "YOLO" (You Only Live Once). He's taking on the century-old tradition of user research, using AI to map an unprecedented "human preference graph" across the entire internet.

He proposes Vibe User Research, hoping to form a closed product loop with Vibe Coding and move toward a new paradigm of "self-iterating products."

As an investor, Yihao Li not only shares his experience of exploring and growing alongside the team in the early days, but also offers a thesis from the capital perspective: What does the vertical AI paradigm look like, and why are the slowest, most expensive, most fragmented "legacy" sectors the best soil for nurturing new oligopolies in the AI era?

This is a conversation about technology, human nature, and market opportunity. We hope it brings fresh inspiration to those of you exploring at the crossroads.

🎬 Our video podcast is here! This episode was recorded inside the Caohejing AI Hacker House in Shanghai. It will be released soon on Koji Yang Yuancheng's channels on WeChat Video, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and YouTube.

📒 The transcript will be published soon on the Crossing WeChat official account.

🟢 00:51 Lightning Round: Age, alma mater, MBTI and zodiac sign, one-sentence description of current company and product, team size, pre-founding experience

🟢 02:08 AI Has Accelerated Production, But Is Stuck on Insight

A massive supply-demand scissors gap: When AI blew the roof off productivity, insight remained stuck in the labor-intensive era. A hundredfold efficiency gap: Traditional user research is linear and serial; AI can interview everyone concurrently. A huge supply-demand contradiction: AI has dramatically sped up product development, yet feedback from users still lags far behind. Why is this a path to something great? When research speed matches development speed, products could potentially achieve "automatic iteration."

🟢 09:10 Finding New Monopolies in a Hundred-Billion-Dollar Stalemate

The more entrenched the market — the more "slow, expensive, and fragmented" — the more attractive the AI opportunity. Endgame推演 for markets: In sectors like Legal, HR, and user research that are already固化 but structurally fragmented, technological variables most easily catalyze new oligopolies. A counterintuitive judgment: The more labor-intensive and traditional the industry, the greater the supply-demand gap that AI creates. Why bet on Chinese teams? Internet-native understanding + exceptional operational and delivery capabilities. Future organizational forms: AI will give rise to many "super companies" of only 1-10 people.

🟢 07:07 The AI That Is Forever Curious

What is the "alignment tax"? The steep hidden cost of synchronizing information and aligning granularity across multiple hosts. Human cognitive marginal returns diminish: You're excited interviewing the first person; by the twentieth, your interest concentration drops sharply. AI's advantage is being "forever curious": It can pursue the hundredth respondent with the same enthusiasm as the first.

🟢 21:38 Humans Are More Honest in Front of AI

If the interviewer is female and the respondent male, the male unconsciously becomes more defensive; but when the other side is AI, people let their guard down. Playing to strengths and avoiding weaknesses: Hack the human perception of AI, using the Hawthorne effect to make respondents feel valued. More truth means more money: Build a benchmark system that uses game theory to guide users toward truthful responses — not just facts, but subjective analysis too. Why do respondents become more talkative with AI? Because the social pressure and performative impulse of facing another person disappear.

🟢 25:05 Large Models Are Good "Answerers," But Terrible "Askers"

Why doesn't simulating users with AI work? Models cannot perceive dynamic, present-tense environments (like the massive psychological shifts before and after the pandemic). A common fallacy in tech circles: Today's LLMs are all trained to be excellent Answerers, but no one has taught them how to be good Askers. How to train AI's questioning ability? Use reinforcement learning (RL) to construct environments, with the industry's best interview data as benchmark.

🟢 30:39 Mapping a "Human Preference Graph" Across the Entire Internet

Farewell to tagging: Traditional user personas are discrete labels; future personas should be three-dimensional models built on language and dialogue. From "project-based" to "continuous and incremental": User research is no longer a massive undertaking every few months, but as routine and frequent as opening a camera to take a photo. Not about replacing product managers: We want to be the PM's "Iron Man suit" — let AI handle tedious interviews, while humans deploy strokes of intuitive genius.

🟢 34:32 Keeping Death Always in Mind

Since extinction is inevitable, what do I leave the world? A product that can influence hundreds of millions. The logic behind the pivot: From computer vision PhD to AI user research — the essence hasn't changed. It's all about understanding the scarcest raw information: "human preference." The $3M Question: If you had $3 million as an investor right now, who would you invest in?

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👦🏻 Host Koji: I founded Crossing and launched AI Hacker House, a community space for the new generation of AI entrepreneurs. I serve as Venture Partner at ZhenFund. I believe technology, especially AI, represents the greatest value-creation opportunity of our generation. Koji's Jike, Koji's website

👧🏻 Host Ronghui: I co-founded Crossing. I've worked at a dollar-denominated VC and spent five years as a Silicon Valley correspondent, tracking technological development and business stories. Feel free to chat and exchange ideas with me. Ronghui's Jike