The endgame of AI is Fat Cat.

"The Self-Contained Viral Structure"

Boredom is a cancer. The AI industry has been a bit too boring lately. No juice left.

AI products are either small gadgets — nothing to talk about — or pure B2B SaaS products. Is there anything more boring than SaaS?

In light of this, I hereby propose: the optimal AI product strategy is Pangmao (Fat Cat).

The biggest problem facing AI products right now is insufficient information input.

The essence of AI is information compression and recombination. The quality of input directly determines the value of output. If the input isn't enough, what AI generates is pure shit — unusable.

This creates a paradox: professional AI tools, like coding assistants (Claude Code), work because they receive precise, high-density instructions from programmers.

But when you try to build AI generation apps for the masses — whether it's a one-click 3D game platform (Seele AI 🤓) or a vibe coding community — they all face the same dilemma: ordinary users can't provide high-quality input. The result? So-called AI 3D games can't surpass the ceiling of 4399; so-called AI coding projects are just novelties that aren't actually fun. Users play once and forget, zero retention. AI Pangmao, however, perfectly sidesteps this problem.

AI Pangmao went viral not because of any technical sophistication, but because it's "high-context" content. The contextual information is abundant, and the audience already knows it all.

You see a Pangmao video, and your brain automatically fills in the background — McDonald's, the Yangtze River Bridge, Honor of Kings. Everyone gets it and smiles, no narration needed.

AI is just one part of the internet's play. It doesn't need to generate any accurate information. Simply presenting the "Pangmao" image instantly maxes out the entertainment value.

AI companion products demonstrate Pangmao's value perfectly.

On MiniMax's STARFIELD app, one of the most popular AI characters is Pangmao. Many middle and elementary school students are actually chatting with this Pangmao agent. What's even more interesting: the voice used in Pangmao videos circulating now is directly taken from this Pangmao agent in STARFIELD.

Pangmao videos themselves form a self-contained viral structure.

Memes spawned an AI character; the AI character's output then became new meme material. Left foot steps on right foot, straight to the sky.

I personally made and published Pangmao videos using CrePal

Pangmao is just the most typical example. Other viral AI videos — like "cat flips you off," "Qin Shi Huang riding a polar bear," knife-cutting-glass ASMR — all follow the same playbook. They're purely AI-generated, purely for the lulz.

Right now, asking AI to process live-action footage and replace Premiere? Can't be done. So the current move is to completely bypass reality and directly generate a self-contained viral structure, something purely fun.

This is actually the common pattern for all new media in their infancy.

When film was first invented, all it could do was Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat — audiences screamed when they saw the train coming toward them, and that was the entire message.

When Douyin first launched, all people could do was dance to BGM and slap on filters. You couldn't film a Cheng Qian-style interview in Douyin's early days.

Any new medium, when first born, can't do something big, comprehensive, and polished. You can only create a self-contained viral structure.

Pangmao to AI is what Arrival of a Train was to film, what video templates were to Douyin — a world-shaking, foundational contribution.

AI's current "meme-ification" trend easily brings Web3 to mind. But they're only superficially similar; their cores are completely different.

Web3's meme-ification is terminal, because its essence is sola fide — justification by faith alone. If you believe Dogecoin has value, it has value. Web3 is thoroughly a virtual economy.

But AI is different. AI's technology is real. Large language models replacing most writing and programming — this is happening, this is certain.

So Web3's meme-ification is its endpoint. AI's meme-ification is only due to a temporary technological bottleneck.

This phase closely resembles the early Web 1.0 days. The killer app hasn't emerged yet; everyone's building wrapper products, just like when everyone was building Foxmail and enterprise yellow pages. If you insist on building a great productivity tool, you genuinely can't do it.

In summary, the conclusion is crystal clear.

At this early stage of AI, the optimal strategy for AI generation apps is to embrace Pangmao.

In the general domain, creating "high-context" content that triggers emotional resonance, that's fun, and that's easily shareable — this is the most effective go-to-market practice.

(Images in this article generated by CrePal, writing assisted by Gemini 2.5 Pro. Made a video version 👇)