God Mian's Faith Open Lecture Is Here

"Learn from him now!" God Mian returned to his alma mater, Southeast University, today, giving a public lecture on faith as a model entrepreneur.

"Public Lecture on Faith" — I really love this course name. It has a certain divinity to it.

The readers who got to see God Mian in person are truly blessed. God Mian will watch over you.

A Xiaohongshu user also dug up a photo of God Mian from 15 years ago, looking young and fresh, winning first prize in an essay speech contest. What nostalgia. This counts as returning to campus in glory. Looking forward to MiniMax's own God Yan — a fellow alumnus — coming to give a talk soon too.

Below is a summary of God Mian's lecture, 45 minutes in total. ZangAI wasn't there in person — we heard it purely through prayer to the God:

01

You can try making films yourself, doing design yourself — try a bit of everything and see which one you actually like more.

While you're doing this, also observe along the way: how are you using this AI? And how does it actually produce things? You'll find that it's actually pretty "dumb." That's been my personal experience — it's still dumb, and in the end a human has to be the backstop.

From there you'll gradually find your own way of working alongside it, and ways to keep improving it.

So everyone should use it more, experience it more. Don't approach it with anxiety — treat it as an experience.

God Mian is right. You have to actually use AI, a lot.

02

Right now we're still just a tools provider. We can't directly help creators monetize. What we do is help creators make better work.

Making better work is the first step toward earning income. As for how they turn good work into more money — that requires platforms like Douyin to do more.

God Mian is being modest. LibTV took on Dreamina, took on Xiao Yunque, took on CapCut — taking on Douyin itself is only a matter of time.

03

The mini-drama ecosystem follows a very typical Chinese pattern. First comes a golden window — few players, lots of money — then it immediately flips into hyper-competition, then a wave of people gets eliminated, and finally it moves toward premiumization. AI compresses this entire cycle dramatically — you might make money for just two months before plunging straight into the cutthroat phase.

After the cutthroat phase, people start getting eliminated, and the cycle repeats.

So platform policies are constantly adjusting too, but one thing doesn't change: better content and better ideas are always the essence.

God Mian's analysis of Hongguo's mini-drama business cuts right to the essence. Hongguo is in danger too.

04

Token prices keep changing too, and mini-dramas will quickly move toward UGC.

The original mini-drama industry required far less investment than film, but it was still capital-intensive — more or less a studio-based system.

But cases like "the girl who got laid off" — made by two or three people and going viral — have already appeared. It's just that for ordinary individuals, the upfront cost of this kind of work is still relatively high.

My judgment is that in another one to two years, the cost for individuals will drop very low, and that's when creation becomes truly lightweight.

What God Mian means is that in the future, everyone will be able to make five-minute mini-dramas. LibTV's current value is underestimated.

05

There's actually no universal standard for the qualities you want in team members. The most important thing is fit.

But if there's something universal that everyone needs, I think there are three things:

First, aligned vision. Everyone has to share the same expectations for the future, and everyone has to want to make it happen. If one person is chasing quick wins and another wants to build something lasting, the team becomes very hard to lead, and you'll be miserable. So aligned vision comes first.

Second, sound values and personal integrity.

Third, resilience. Whether you're founding a company or working a job, nothing ever goes smoothly all the way. If someone turns around and walks away at the first sign of difficulty, they'll never amount to much.

God Mian said it: those who left him when things got hard in the early days are neither brothers, nor co-founders.

06

Internships matter a lot, because when companies screen candidates, they often don't know how to choose themselves. Back when I was looking for an internship, I went to campus recruiting events in Nanjing, and just getting past the resume screening was so hard... I probably sent out hundreds, maybe a thousand applications, and two or three would come back. Don't worry about whether the timing is right — grab it and do it. During that stretch I even skipped two months of classes.

Second, what if you can't find an internship? Then build your own AI project. The good thing about this era is that we return to cases, to the content itself. Go build a small AI app, become your own KOL, run your own media account, and put out the things you've made and the things you think.

Thank you, alumnus Melvin Chen, for sharing. Truly packed with substance — practical, actionable, and ready to implement.

07

Society's hot topics keep changing, so you have to stick to what you love and keep thinking independently. Otherwise you chase trends every day, and two days later the trend is cold and boring — then what? Of course, you also need basic judgment. Don't hear that "AI is going to replace many actors" and still impulsively run off to become an actor — that road would be too hard.

Within what you love, seriously thinking through your relationship with AI is a very important thing.

God Mian said it: don't chase the trends.

08

I went into the internet industry, which was already very close to AI. Long before the outside world realized what was happening, we had already gone through several rounds of internal assessment.

Where will this thing go in the future? At the time it felt early; two days later you'd look back and the picture had changed. So you see, even the biggest giants have to first see the trend clearly in their own minds. And that's not easy either. But once it sees clearly — watch how fast it chases!

God Mian indeed copied TapNow fast. Words matched by action — very ByteDance of him.

09

You ask whether AI will become life? Then first you have to be clear about what life is. If intelligence is one signal of life, and feeling is another, then we first have to ask whether what's now emerging in AI deserves to be called intelligence.

I'm inclined to think that what AI is now exhibiting increasingly deserves the name intelligence. You could even say this is the first time in the known human world that intelligence has appeared in something other than a human.

Will it develop feelings in the future? With current technology, that threshold hasn't been crossed. But if you look at it through the lens of materialism and the development of science, then of course it's possible.

Following that logic, new life will emerge in the future. If you define life as feeling plus intelligence, then I believe new life will come. Humans will create new life, and humanity will then have to explore its relationship with that new life.

You might add another layer to the definition — it has to have a body. And what is a body? Carbon-based or silicon-based? How do you define it? How does it obtain energy, and how efficiently?

This is where the difference gets huge. The human brain is so small, yet it can think about so many things — incredibly efficient. Today's AI, to keep thinking nonstop, needs a whole cabinet full of GPUs (laughs), plus a constant power supply. Of course chips will keep shrinking, maybe smaller and smaller in the future. But it's also possible the technology just gets stuck there. Hard to say.

So there are really two -isms pulling at each other here. One is humanism: humans ultimately want to be the masters, to have self-worth. But at the same time, we should also respect other forms of life.

Of course, some people get depressed over this — if there's going to be other life, I might as well not live at all.

No. A life lived out is a life with meaning.

God Mian is great. He's already pondering whether he'll create entirely new life. Worthy of the name God Mian.

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