null: AI Is the Oxygen of the New World

For this episode of Signal and Noise, we invited Gaoliming, founder of Securities Star and a veteran AI investor widely known as the "sweeper monk of the AI era."

Over six hours of deep conversation, we kept circling back to the same questions: What does a "six orders of magnitude" leap actually mean? What does it mean to "stand with the steepest slope of the era"? What are "unsolvable problems"?

Gaoliming's answer to everything converged on one thing: AI.

Because AI is the oxygen of the new world, and we are standing on the eve of a species-level explosion.

In an age of radical transformation, everything — from each individual's value anchor and personal habits to corporate organizations and social structures — will be redefined.

Whether or not you've already thrown yourself into AI, we invite you to join us in listening to this discourse on the future.

If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, feel free to leave a comment below.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that we found particularly illuminating, presented here in article form.

Enjoy.

Gaoliming: My senior fellow apprentice is a professor at Stanford in the United States, and he often gives us lectures on his market views. We only ask him one question: What do you think this thing is, assuming it improves by six orders of magnitude?

He's been telling us for three years straight now that AI isn't a six-orders-of-magnitude problem — it's ten orders of magnitude, or even higher.

Oasis Capital: Why did he say six orders of magnitude?

Gaoliming: Probably just a rough estimate. Would three orders of magnitude work? Like when we invest in young people today, maybe you only see something with three orders of magnitude improvement in them. But for a truly massive revolution, you need six orders of magnitude or more for it to become an ecosystem. And that six-orders-of-magnitude improvement has to happen fast enough. If it takes 100 years to achieve six orders of magnitude growth, we'll all be dead, right? For a technology revolution, especially one governed by Moore's Law, achieving six orders of magnitude improvement is actually quite easy.

Gaoliming: Normalcy is risk.

Oasis Capital: How do you understand that?

Gaoliming: You have to go to extremes. Want something to succeed? Notice how it always opens up new space in extreme places — that's where new value and new opportunities emerge.

What's normalcy? It's where countless people already are, all playing zero-sum games in a stock market. How do you win there? Whether investing or starting a company, don't go to those places.

For most of us doing investment, you wait for the normal to go extreme — when ten variables collapse into one dominant variable. That's when you move. Especially in secondary market investing: normalcy is risk. All you can do is wait for mean reversion.

Oasis Capital: I once met an entrepreneur who'd just come back from OpenAI. He said something fascinating. I asked him: What did you actually do inside OpenAI? He said, "We basically assumed the world is a sphere, and we searched for cracks at its edges. Once we found a crack, we all worked together to tear it open." What you're describing — waiting for mean reversion — that's not the money I want to make. I want to make the money from tearing open that crack, right? Push a little further, and maybe the whole sphere expands dramatically.

Gaoliming: And civilization advances, the world advances — it always moves forward at the edges. The most frontier stuff gives you the highest returns.

Think about it: if the frontier didn't offer the highest returns, how would civilization move forward? If you always gave high returns to "the past," everyone would shrink back. Where would the exponential growth come from?

Oasis Capital: When did you become certain that this was the thread you needed to spend your time on?

Gaoliming: 2022. All in. Nothing else mattered.

Honestly treat yourself as a primary school student — you can't overdraw yourself fast enough. Because think about it: at any place where the steepest slope is rising, you're basically doing two things. First, how do you position yourself with that steepest slope? Second, find stronger people in that space. If you're not in the circle from day one, not with those strong people — when are you going to join? Without time invested, without tuition paid, without immersion, it's hard to develop good taste. You won't even know what the core problems are, or which direction to go.

Oasis Capital: Then what does "all in" mean? What does "with the slope" mean?

Gaoliming: First find the strongest people in that field and hang out with them every day. Spend your time on Substack, on YouTube — the top experts. One category is researchers in top labs; another is founders of top startups, how they think about these problems. You have to put the time in first. Letting go of your past is especially important. Start over.

Gaoliming: Think about it — models are our oxygen. What were animals before oxygen? What emerged after oxygen? Mammals. So models are today's oxygen. If you can't breathe this oxygen, you're a creature of the previous era. Many entrepreneurs today, probably more than half, are still living in the past. In an oxygen-rich era, they're insistently doing anaerobic work. Much of their "innovation" is actually building things for the old era.

Oasis Capital: Still using oxygen to repair the old era.

Sometimes when we look at entrepreneurs, it's interesting. Some push the new era forward; others obstruct the clearing of the old era — and there are especially many of the latter.

Gaoliming: That's beautifully put. Yes, obstructing the clearing of the old era.

Oasis Capital: Sometimes you realize certain things, certain capacities, simply need to be cleared. Or an industry has reached that stage, but many people say, let me graft a new era onto this for you.

Gaoliming: To survive a bit longer.

Oasis Capital: In the end, they get cleared too. But in this process, they make the new era suffer, and leave the old era full of false hope.

Gaoliming: Where you sit determines where you stand. I'm from the old era — what am I supposed to do? Of course I'd say, let me use this to graft onto myself and get better. But think about it: the oxygen-rich era gave rise to humans. If you're not heading toward humans, if you insist on going toward bacteria, what's the point?

Oasis Capital: The oxygen metaphor is excellent. It suggests the difference between future companies might be the difference between bacteria and humans.

Actually, after Earth got oxygen, the Jurassic period came. Mammals grew enormous then — animals grew huge, dinosaurs grew huge, even dragonflies grew huge. Then came a great clearing that brought all animals back to normal size.

If we analogize this to companies today, is it possible we're heading toward a Jurassic period, where some super-massive companies emerge, then some external force conducts a clearing, and finally companies return to normal size?

Gaoliming: This isn't a linear process. Today we still don't understand what corporate organizational structures will look like under such massive oxygen supply. We don't know yet.