The popularity of ChatGPT has escalated, and AIGC's investors have begun to pay attention to "Wensheng Tu"

(Image source: Pixabay)

AIGC is a gamble of old Internet people, a carnival of dollar funds, and an attack of the times.

@数科星球 Original

Author丨Koko Editor丨Jurika

In the first quarter of 2023, ChatGPT quickly came out of the circle with a "crazy" attitude, and the AIGC industry driven by this product has also repeatedly appeared on the hot search.

Today, some people are starting to "sing short" the industry, believing that AIGC is nothing more than a short-term hot spot. As investors, they give a different view than most people. Spring River Water Heating Duck Prophet, now, the latter's cognition is rapidly iterating on an hourly basis.

After talking to a number of first-line mainstream fund investors, digital-planet (ID: digital-planet) hopes to show the freshest investment logic and industry details in the investment circle to the world. Whether it's ChatGPT or AIGC, we try not to make subjective evaluations.

Whether it is hype or revolution, prejudice or objectivity, is for reference only.

01

From "Bunsheng Wen" to "Bunsheng Diagram"

An investment institution practitioner expressed the name of digital-planet. He showed us his analysis of the track, which was astonishing in detail. A week ago, this analysis did not exist, "we picked the lamp and fought the liver."

At present, the agency has a good understanding of the development of AIGC's early projects in Silicon Valley and other places, and they hope to use this analysis as a blueprint to find benchmarks in the Chinese market.

For a long time, looking for the Chinese version of the "Copy to China" project (Copy to China abbreviated as CTC) is the normal entrepreneurial model of the Chinese Internet, which refers to copying ideas from abroad into China and opening up a new market, which is the tried-and-true investment logic of investment funds. In this logic, companies such as the Chinese version of ICQ, the Chinese version of Tumblr, the Chinese version of Twitter, and the Chinese version of Facebook were born. At its core, CTC is the localization of foreign models, which reduce the risk of innovation and guarantee the valuation of start-ups.

In the past, CTC's investment has made many investment institutions a lot of money. The only disadvantage is that the project looks less original, giving the impression of "plagiarism". Before the writing of this article, as far as we know, there are still many investment institutions in the industry who hope to invest in ideal AIGC targets through CTC.

"But at the moment this technique doesn't seem to work in the AIGC industry," the agency practitioner interrupted the digital-planet (ID: digital-planet). After going around in Shanghai, the investor also did not find a company that benchmarked Jasper, a Wensheng Wen marketing copywriting AI company valued at $1.5 billion (2022.10) across the coast.

In the AIGC (i.e. artificial intelligence-generated content) industry, the industry is usually divided into vertical tracks such as Wen Sheng Wen and Wen Sheng Tu according to the input and output forms of content. The underlying technology relied on to generate AI content in the figure and text is different, resulting in differences in the investment logic between the two.

Generally speaking, Jasper has been successful and should have a lot of investment targets in the country. However, under the investigation of domestic investors such as "grate combing hair", no suitable investment targets have been found. In the face of repeated inquiries from digital-planet (ID: digital-planet), some investors gave their own views: "The United States may be the first picture and then the picture, and in China it may be the first picture and then the text."

Search engine SEO is a typical scenario for Wen Shengwen. In Google, a large number of practitioners now rely on AIGC to generate content in order to obtain top search engine rankings and better attract traffic to products. However, in China, due to the particularity of the market, the market size of Wensheng Wen is not very large. "There is no very open text model for startups in China, which will delay the launch of AI models."

The "ChatGPT-like" opportunity has been used as the main strategy by some big manufacturers, further reducing investors' expectations of the track - "We can't just take money to buy a company's stock", one investor laughed.

In this way, some investors have set their sights on the scene of Wen Sheng Tu.

02

The madness of 100x valuations

"Preferences in the investment world change quickly." To deny the Wensheng Wen track, an institution took only one week to immediately launch a search for the Wensheng Chart industry.

Influenced by the open source of Stable Diffusion (an artificial intelligence underlying computing model), the data training of the Vensheng graph industry has been greatly improved (in a Chinese environment). On the one hand, innovative enterprises have the support of the underlying model; On the other hand, this model can run on consumer GPUs, which greatly reduces R&D costs and increases the speed of time to market.

Another practitioner echoed the idea: "Now that everyone is just starting to run, Stable Diffusion logic, I think everyone has a chance."

Having said that, in the understanding of digital-planet (ID: digital-planet), except for a few big name funds, for most investment institutions, there are not many investment cases, and the reply we get is "they only have one or two projects in their hands".

Investors are racing against the clock to know everything, and in addition to keeping an eye on the project, they are also actively synchronizing the dynamics of their peers. In terms of trends, today, the supply of high-quality projects within the market is far from enough. Some projects did not show full product power and moats in front of investors, resulting in hasty investment inquiries. In the freshman project, founders with "Qingbei" and "Ivy" backgrounds have appeared one after another, and at the same time, a large number of old Internet people are also rubbing their hands and entering the game.

A few days ago, the news that the co-founder of Meituan created an AI project was flying all over the world, which is a reflection of this psychology.

In the eyes of some investors, this is a big bet: "Some projects we know have already given 100x PS valuation in the pre-A round." In the past, such valuations were "very exaggerated" in any track. Even with such high valuations, some investment institutions still give TS (full name Term Sheet, meaning investment term list, which is a principled agreement between investment companies and startups on future investment exchanges).

"There are too many speculators," exclaimed one primary market investor. For a time, artificial intelligence research institutes, corporate executives, cross-border practitioners, returnees, and local AI talents have all become the focus of investors.

Among the many entrepreneurs, some have already achieved financial freedom, and some are almost 50 years old and "very old".

On the other hand, "mapping" loses its meaning, and the items that can be found are expensive or expensive. "Some projects only know the name, we can't find anyone, we used to take the catalog to find the project, now there are too many underwater projects, and some people don't know what it's called, so they can only run by themselves," said a practitioner from an early investment institution.

In the past, investors would do their research based on the project at hand. Ask competitors to get industry-wide information, push three, push ten and grasp the overall situation. However, in AIGC, there is a serious fragmentation between projects, which further makes it more difficult for investors to search for projects.

"Anyway, I feel very struggling, it is logical that there should not be such a small number of projects, and my headache now is that I can't find it, and I don't know where to look," one investor complained to us.

03

A brilliant closing performance

In the process of recording the AIGC industry by digital-planet (ID: digital-planet), one of the most asked questions is "how long can AIGC still be hot". In fact, it is very difficult to answer this question, and we believe, at least at the moment, that no one can give a very convincing explanation. But from a capital perspective alone, we believe this change will be lasting.

One reason is anxiety from dollar funds (broadly defined as foreign currency funds).

At the beginning of the birth of domestic venture capital, US dollar funds have always been the leader of the industry. Fundraising from US dollar VC and listing of Chinese concept stocks have become a golden channel for countless entrepreneurs to achieve wealth freedom. But time has passed, and for reasons that are well known, this pathway has been severely affected. For dollar funds, it is under pressure from both the fundraising and investment ends.

In terms of investment, in the domestic information innovation, hard technology, new energy and other tracks, the supervision of foreign currency funds by policies is becoming more and more stringent; At the same time, overseas investors are increasingly concerned about US dollar funds. Just at the right time, AIGC appeared, which is the growth concept of Zheng Miao. For a time, the logic of capital and the track hit it off, objectively promoting today's hot situation.

Whether it's a rush investment or a self-proof thing seems to have become less important.

Some say that the rise of AIGC may be the last gorgeous dance of foreign currency money, which is too poetic for us to comment. After the dialogue was mostly investors, practitioners have great expectations for the rise of RMB funds, on the contrary, due to well-known reasons, in the context of stricter regulation, the role that foreign currencies can participate in will become more and more limited.

In the matter of months, AIGC has returned from "worship" to ChatGPT. The trend we're seeing is that investors are paying more attention to the Venturon industry. After inquiring about a number of domestic photo websites, we got replies such as "there is research under discussion".

Will the development of AIGC in China be "first picture before text" as investors say? We will continue to follow up and bring you more fresh and cutting-edge information.

Let's wait and see how this change takes place.