[Year-End Review ①] 10 AI Aha Moments: Minghao Zhuang on RSI, AI Spectacles and Roughness, and Startup Opportunities Between Giants

➤ The first installment of Crossing's 2026 year-end AI retrospective is here!

This year, we're not doing a comprehensive news roundup (leave that to AI summaries). Instead, we've invited friends of Crossing who are on the front lines of AI — founders, researchers, and investors — to share 10 AI moments that truly moved them.

This week's guest is Minghao Zhuang, host of Tulong Zhishu. His 10 Aha Moments contain surprises, shocks, and moments of wanting to reclaim a little raw humanity after witnessing the spectacle AI has wrought:

00:36 OpenClaw: What remains after the viral frenzy?

06:28 Seedance 2.0: Is ByteDance winning on models alone?

14:34 Sora 2 shuts down: When a whale falls, who thrives?

19:09 RSI: How did one Anthropic article give Minghao chills?

28:21 Why are legacy hardware makers back in the spotlight?

31:26 Codex merges with ChatGPT: How to make sense of it?

35:12 Qwen small models: Capabilities move to the edge — can old opportunities be rebuilt?

38:40 App Store revenue shifts: Can software moats still hold?

41:33 The model "kill line": Is model competition being scored differently now?

45:12 Opus 5.5 — why does Minghao just want to say: "Let it burn"?

Bonus at 48:38: From Yun Zhao and A Dou to the Crossing road-trip podcast — AI conjures spectacles daily, yet I find myself craving something rougher around the edges.

🎬 Our video podcast will be available simultaneously on Koji's WeChat Channels, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, YouTube, and other platforms.

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

Subscribe to Crossing: 🚦 We track the industry shifts and entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new wave of AI technology.

🚦 Crossing is Steve Jobs' metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming every industry. We seek out, interview, and bring together a new generation of AI founders and active builders in the AI era. Together, we explore and embrace the new changes, the new possibilities.

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

View episode transcript on Xiaoyuzhou