Yachen Song: Advancing Civilization for the World, Creating Happiness for Humanity | North Slope Project

What happens when "creating a world" becomes as simple as shooting a video?

In this episode of Signal and Noise, we sit down with Yachen Song, founder of VAST. From SenseTime's AI animation and gaming business, to being an early member helping build MiniMax, to founding VAST — he has witnessed the rapid evolution of AI-powered content creation, and gradually spotted a gap that remains unfilled: while the barriers to creating text, images, and video keep falling, 3D content production still lingers in the "industrial era."

In Song's view, this era's "3D camera" has yet to be invented. In this episode, we discuss the real inflection point for AI 3D, and content forms beyond gaming; how a company without OKRs that encourages open debate confronts something that can't be validated in the short term; and how a long-term-oriented founder maintains patience and judgment amid uncertainty.

At the end, he brings up The Man Who Planted Trees: "No matter what happens outside, the man who plants trees simply buries seed after seed into the soil, day after day, completing that seemingly impossible task."

Today's VAST may still be just a thicket, but he is willing to keep planting until it grows into a forest.

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

The original podcast was approximately 23,000 words; this article has been edited and condensed to roughly 4,000 words.

Enjoy

Oasis Capital: People used to communicate purely through text; now they say "send me a pic" or "send me a deck."

3D might be the next frontier — a higher-information-density medium, and the problem you've been trying to solve. If it gets solved, all interaction could become something "game-like."

Yachen Song: Or rather, games themselves are a form of interactive content, just as film is a form of video content.

Oasis Capital: Maybe it's because games have high enough margins to sustain expensive 3D production costs?

Yachen Song: Exactly, same as film. Before short video and phone cameras, the typical situation was: only a handful of people in the world could make something like movies or TV shows, and it was incredibly difficult — a project cost hundreds of millions and took years, with very high barriers. You spend 200 million and need to earn back 2 billion at the box office.

Games are the same. Why is GTA 6 taking so long? Because it requires enormous manpower, massive production pipelines, high costs — building a huge world that people pay for all at once.

I think relative to future interactive content, all games today — not just Black Myth: Wukong or Honor of Kings, but even all kinds of mini-games — are "AAA." They all require dozens or hundreds of specialized people working for extended periods.

Oasis Capital: What's your vision now?

Yachen Song: "Let everyone create worlds."

If robots replace primary and secondary industries, AI replaces tertiary industries, and biomedicine lets people live longer, then I believe only one thing ultimately remains: creating worlds, experiencing worlds.

A person's future value equals the total time others spend in the different worlds they create. Everyone wants to amplify their value — though whether that value manifests as money, compute, tokens, or something else, I don't know.

But I imagine a future where every person, every moment, is doing their utmost to create better experiences for others, to draw more people into their worlds to spend time and find happiness — a world of "all for one, one for all."

Our company slogan is "To advance civilization for the world, to create happiness for humanity." Li Dazhao said this, in a different context; we adopted it because it's exactly what we want to do. What does "advance civilization for the world" mean? Civilization is a space where a group of people spend time together, and because they spend that time, all kinds of stories emerge — the combination of those stories is civilization. The first time I read this sentence, I felt this era would arrive, that humanity already had consensus and preparation for it.

Oasis Capital: Why do you find stories so important? Or are stories the foundation of civilization?

Yachen Song: Stories are the microcosm of civilization; "existence" is more the combination of space, time, and people.

Oasis Capital: So you've given this phrase more of a spacetime perspective.

Yachen Song: We hope people today and in the future can live a hundred years in this world as happily and fulfilled as possible.

Oasis Capital: You've been leveling up these past three or four years. Sometimes entrepreneurship is like drawing cards — and you keep pulling rare heroes, getting good drops in the game.

Yachen Song: Yes, with help from benefactors.

Oasis Capital: And these are all scarce heroes — I can imagine the stars maxed out on the card, very high rarity. Because sometimes founders are essentially opening blind boxes when hiring, but you can always identify and win over great talent.

Why do talented people still choose VAST when they have so many options?

Yachen Song: Because the company is relatively pure when it comes to "people," especially at the 30-50 person scale. And these pure people share a trait: beyond what they're exceptionally good at, they don't want to care about other things — complex interpersonal dynamics, organizational politics, administration. Researchers want to do good research; business people want to hit their targets. The best people are often this pure.

Pure people often can't tolerate noise, and not tolerating noise puts you at a disadvantage in many environments. Because noise sometimes does appear to create value in the short term, though not necessarily in the long term.

On one hand, our team has a group of excellent, pure people who can pursue their goals with relatively little noise in the company. On the other hand, we're still working on this: when the team expands rapidly due to business needs, we need support in various areas.

But overall, we want to maintain a relatively pure environment where capable people can be seen, encouraged, motivated, recognized — with no countervailing force against them. This sounds simple, but it's extraordinarily difficult to actually achieve; most of the time, it's counter to human nature.

Yachen Song: I often feel that many things aren't "what I want," nor are they up to me — the world simply is this way. It's just that at this particular moment, there's a person like me, and through me, this thing gets realized. Like this podcast today — I didn't prepare in advance, didn't bring a list of questions, but what I said today flowed through me rather than being designed by me. On this, I am powerless.

What could I possibly have that's so special, having just graduated not long ago? I'm powerless to change many things. But I'm happy, even eager, to let it flow, and excited by this — which is why I'm patient with many things.

Oasis Capital: When did you develop this worldview — let's call it "all things flow through me"?

Yachen Song: I often feel like I'm connected to Wi-Fi, but this Wi-Fi isn't mine, isn't anyone else's, isn't even humanity's.

Of course this is something many colleagues criticize me for, but I often just feel something is right, or that I simply like a certain person. Someone asked: what's your standard for liking them? I said I see a shape — I can even describe this shape. It's a dam, I said, and this is exactly the kind of dam we need.

Oasis Capital: So you abstract a very complex system into one or two concepts, or a representational shape.

Yachen Song: Yes.

Oasis Capital: Is "thinking" a positive or negative word for your "Wi-Fi connection"?

Yachen Song: Excellent question. I actually went through two stages with this. Early on, I believed thinking was harmful. My high school was a church school with many excellent scholars, quite a few retired university professors, many educated at excellent schools like Oxford, Cambridge, Penn.

Oasis Capital: It was essentially a sanctuary. So was the school's purpose to train pastors?

Yachen Song: Quite a few classmates did end up becoming pastors in places like the Solomon Islands. But actually we studied a lot of Bible Study, Theology, philosophy and other speculative subjects. Some people were very devout at the faith level, but it was also the result of very rational thinking.

Oasis Capital: So rationality became a strategy.

Yachen Song: Right, or rather, "faith" is something that can be proven.

For college I went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore — a city with a very high African American population. The locals' engagement with the Bible was very emotional; they might not even be able to tell the stories in the Bible clearly, but they believed and recited with conviction.

Oasis Capital: More like singing, finding that feeling?

Yachen Song: Right. But whose faith is more devout? Hard to say. At least the Bible tells us the latter's faith is more pure.

After Jesus resurrected and came to his disciples, there was one called Thomas. Thomas said: "I don't believe a person can resurrect. Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, touch the wounds." Later he really saw and touched them, and said "My God." But this belief was different from the others'.

Oasis Capital: Because this was conditional devotion. Buddhism has a similar distinction — for example, the Consciousness-Only school cultivates through a very rigorous logical system, requiring deep thinking, with "transforming consciousness into wisdom," the "eight consciousnesses," and a whole rigorous framework that scholars study. Xuanzang was one of the most important synthesizers.

The Pure Land method is simple — you don't need to know anything, just chant "Namo Amitabha Buddha" and you can become a Buddha, naturally reborn in the Western Pure Land. These two methods — the former may take many lifetimes to see one's true nature, while the latter emphasizes "becoming a Buddha in this very moment."

There was a story in Biographies of Eminent Monks about a monk walking in the mountains observing qi, who discovered a beam of golden light shining from a village with excellent auspicious signs. He said there was a great bodhisattva here. When he went to look, he found an old lady chanting sutras, but she was chanting them wrong. The monk told her: "You're chanting wrong, it should be like this." The old lady thanked him, and the monk left happily.

When he returned later, he could no longer see the golden light.

This story struck me, because as a STEM person you think: if you're chanting wrong, how could you possibly understand? Even connecting to Wi-Fi must have a standard password — you can't ignore uppercase and lowercase, how else would you connect?

Oasis Capital: Oasis Capital has always talked about vitality. Over these years in your own entrepreneurial journey, you've surely had many experiences. In your worldview, what is vitality?

Yachen Song: Oasis printed a book by a French author called The Man Who Planted Trees — very thin, I finished it quickly. What I felt from it was: the protagonist does something that from others' perspective is "doing what one knows is impossible" — planting trees in the desert. But from his perspective, it's not so tragic; he simply feels this is bound to happen, and he just slowly does it.

At first nothing would grow — wrong seeds, or wrong planting methods. After a few years some began to survive, after a decade it became a small grove, finally a great forest. Through this process, WWI, WWII and all kinds of things happened outside, but to him those were just noise; he just slowly planted here with equanimity and patience.

I feel our company is doing something similar: we believe there will be a new continent, where many trees will grow and many creators and content forms will emerge. The future won't be hundreds or thousands of people serving one person's creative vision; the future should be everyone serving their own creativity, realizing their own vision. We believe the ultimate form of expression may be "worlds."

Yachen Song: In 2023 I did an investor presentation. At the time we knew the platform path might not yet work. I found an image of Columbus and said: "Even if you sail the opposite direction, as long as the Americas exist, you'll eventually reach them."

For a long time people didn't understand, but now a small thicket has grown: we have users, creators, many works — more and more people are beginning to see it. I believe it will eventually become a forest, and unlike that old man, besides us, many others may gradually see its value and come plant these trees together.

Oasis Capital: I recently watched the film The Odyssey. At its core it tells a hero's journey, but everything happens simply because he wants to go home.

So in his worldview, there's really only one thing: "going home." This journey ultimately becomes the hero's journey. As you just said: every founder's entrepreneurial process looks like a hero's journey to others — passing through trials, facing sirens and various difficulties; but to themselves, they just want to go home.

If the vision is home, then the founder simply wants to reach the other shore; everything in the process is a means to reach that shore, and the story that ultimately forms becomes the heroic tale.

Actually my biggest takeaway was that entrepreneurship, or a person's growth process, is extremely pure and simple — it's one thing, "going home," and everything else is added by others afterward. And once you're in any choice, you start wondering what your crew thinks of you, or whether to fight this monster, how history will write this — once you add this so-called sense of history, you turn it into noise, you interfere with it, right? The more purely you want to go home, the more beautiful the story becomes. And the degree of its beauty is positively correlated with the purity of your desire to go home, right?

Yachen Song: Even correlated with the probability of successfully getting home.

After the war, most people didn't actually get home. As in The Odyssey, very very few made it home. So I think pure intention is very important.

Oasis Capital: Right — that pure heart that simply wants to go home is itself extremely important, constantly on one's mind.