Li Yizhou, the packaged AI giant
Li Yizhou deeply understands that winning customers and making money is not just a matter of hard work, but a process of performance, which he calls a "real performance".
Author|小遥 付饶
Edited by Wilderness
WeChat public account: slightly large reference (ID: hyzibenlun)
Two controversial figures who are good at making money stood in the C position of public opinion after the holiday.
One is Mimeng, who made more than 100 million dollars in the short drama "I was a stepmother after the 80s" during the Spring Festival, and the other is Li Yizhou, after the Sora fire, he was ridiculed by netizens as "the only Chinese god in the AI circle who can be on an equal footing with Ultraman". According to the data circulating in the industry, this self-media blogger, who now focuses on selling AI courses, has also earned more than 100 million.
It's just that in the Chinese Internet where Muqiang is prevalent, the treatment these two "rich people" get is not friendly.
The difference is that Mi Meng incited emotions because of the fabrication of facts in the past, but since she switched to short dramas, the wind has gradually changed; Li Yizhou has been hammered very thoroughly, and even named by CCTV, whether it is the current knowledge payment or the so-called continuous entrepreneurship before, his too sensitive figure makes it difficult for him to get rid of the label of "speculator".
When most of the entrepreneurs who really invest money and energy in AI are still groping forward in the dark night, this packaged AI giant has become a definite vested interest. The gap and irony are clear at a glance.
After the storm of alleged infringement, Li Yizhou's AI course was removed from the entire network on February 22, and his personal video account was also banned from following, and now it has been restored. At this point, this money-making performance has come to an end for the time being, but for Li Yizhou, this is far from the end.
After all, the flip side of speculators is "tenacity". If one path fails, he will always try to find the next path and copy the routines he is familiar with.
01 Storm Center
Li Yizhou seized this opportunity in mid-February 2023, not long after ChatGPT sparked heated discussions in China, and began to post artificial intelligence and ChatGPT-related videos on Douyin and Xiaohongshu.
He is a self-media blogger in the field of knowledge payment, and then began to sell 199 yuan in the live broadcast room"Everyone's artificial intelligence course", relying on repeated "There is still the last place", "The last 10 places, if you can't grab it, you will be 999", "It will be broadcast in another 30 seconds" and other hungry marketing words, he successfully sold 250,000 copies of this course in less than a year, becoming the "biggest beneficiary of AI" in the mouth of netizens.
If this is the case, even if people are no longer accustomed to this practice, I am afraid that it will not be ridiculed by the whole network.
But the problem is that this staggering sales are clearly influenced by other factors. That is the title of "Dr. Tsinghua" and "founder of a technology company" that he used to endorse himself in publicity, the character of "a student of engineering" and "Tsinghua Xueba", and the statement in the profile of the Douyin account that he is good at solving artificial intelligence problems. The authenticity of these contents has sparked a lot of controversy.
First of all, it is true that Li Yizhou is a doctor from Tsinghua University.
But to be precise, he graduated from Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts with a doctorate, and studied at the School of Design and Art of Hunan University for both his bachelor's and master's degrees. It is rumored that in the School of Arts of Hunan University, art students can read the cultural course of the college entrance examination with a score of about 300.
His claim that "I studied engineering" in his propaganda is also quite controversial, because according to the job search show he once attended, it can be seen that he studied industrial design and design innovation methods, and perhaps the name is related to industry is the reason why he calls it "engineering", but in fact, this major still belongs to the design category. This is confirmed by the fact that he is promoting the advancement of artificial intelligence - referring to its ability to turn pictures into videos in 15 minutes, and the collar of the bachelor's gown is pink on the doctoral graduation photo posted.
A search for Li Yizhou, whose author is Tsinghua University, has led to three academic journal papers, two of which were published in 2012 and one in 2013, namely "Design Industrialization and National Competitiveness", "Encountering Design in Museums and Streets, Tasting Culture in Freedom and Disorder - A Journey to the 2012 London Design Festival" and "A Century of Urban Culture - London Design Museum".
His research and expertise in artificial intelligence are not reflected in the academic aspect. The only thing that can catch up with intelligence is probably his three ventures before selling classes, and the projects of these three ventures are Magic Mirror APP, Weimi APP and 12sleep KeyWu Technology. This may also be the origin of his self-proclaimed "founder of three technology companies".
In addition to the lack of alignment in the field, the most important thing that made Li Yizhou the target of public criticism was that his course was accused of having a lot of water.
The 199 yuan AI course he sells mainly consists of 39 lessons, 24 of which are less than 10 minutes long. And the content of the course is very basic, which can be called the level of literacy, and it is also interspersed from time to time.
He made a "Yizhou Intelligence" website that can be used for AI image creation, and provided 1.1 million computing power points for each student who purchased the course, and he could draw pictures about 10 times with the entrance of this website. The website was recently pointed out by an UP owner of station B that it had stolen many models of the author's models, and asked Li Yizhou and his team to remove all unauthorized models and publicly apologize within 5 days of the release of the rights protection video.
On February 22, LiblibAI, the largest AI model and AI creation sharing community in China, also wrote an article, saying that "Yizhou Intelligence" uploaded the community's model without authorization and used it for commercialization, which damaged the rights and interests of the company and model creators, and has resorted to legal means. At present, the stolen model on the website has been taken off the shelves.
Figure: The official website of "Yizhou Intelligence" has added a notice of model copyright description
In this regard, when replying to the question of the whipper on February 21, Li Yizhou expressed helplessness about the current black and red out of the circle, and refused to ask further questions, but said that it was difficult to reply on the cusp of the storm now. On the evening of the same day, he responded to Jiemian News, saying, "The corresponding content is being sorted out, and the incident has been misunderstood and exaggerated." ”
Li Yizhou, who seems to be aggrieved, is actually not aggrieved.
02Serial entrepreneurship
When mentioning the name Li Yizhou, people should be most impressed by the scene in May 2012, when he participated in the TV job search show "You Belong", he fought against Zhou Hongyi, Pan Shiyi and other bigwigs, because of his outstanding performance on the show, Li Guoqing provided Li Yizhou with an internship opportunity as the director of UIUE, and Cai Hu, CEO of Baidu Elohas, who is also a Tsinghua alumnus, threw an olive branch to Li Yizhou, and he turned off the lights. In the end, Pan Shiyi offered "a monthly salary of more than 6,000 yuan and contact with the world's best architectural design masters" as an additional condition to poach Li Yizhou.
Pictured: Li Yizhou was offered an internship at SOHO China's Design Department at "It's All About You".
At that time, Li Yizhou, who had already obtained an internship position in the design department of SOHO China, was seen as a phenomenon of "Internet culture". Since then, he has been labeled as "super cow job seeker" and "Tsinghua Dr." on the Internet, and all of a sudden, "Tsinghua Dr. Li Yizhou's tongue battle boss group" has become a hot word on the Internet, and Li Yizhou himself has also gained a large wave of traffic.
Although he tasted the huge power brought by Internet traffic for the first time, Li Yizhou still chose to shine in his profession at that time, and did not effectively convert this wave of traffic into dividends. He said, "Now the design industry is a bit off, I want to spread the right value of industrial design", he also said that he wants to make things that are slow to experience, and will not follow the trend.
This does not mean that Li Yizhou has no ambition, on the contrary, his repeated entrepreneurial experience can also show his ambition from the side.
After that, some insiders said that Li Yizhou, who interned at SOHO China for two months, quit his job due to the wrong professional direction and switched to 360 as a product manager. However, when he talks about his business journey, these two jobs - and his few work experiences - he does not even mention them, but instead highlights his later entrepreneurial experience.
Before taking this AI traffic express, Li Yizhou had a lot of tosses on the road to entrepreneurship.
At the beginning, Li Yizhou and his friends turned the jeans clothing business on the forum and earned the first pot of gold - 40,000 yuan. After that, Li Yizhou claimed to have opened 3 design companies during his master's degree in 2008, transforming from simple industrial design to design consulting, "Every company makes money, but it doesn't make a lot of money, and it makes 2 million a year at most." But the authenticity of Li Yizhou's entrepreneurial experience is impossible to investigate.
According to public information, Li Yizhou's real entrepreneurial time was in 2012. While still studying for a Ph.D., he targeted young women, and asked his Tsinghua classmates to design an app called "Magic Mirror", which can send sound wave commands to the mirror and make the mirror a "camera". However, no mirror manufacturer is willing to take on a small business with only a few dozen mirrors, and the expensive transportation cost of large, fragile mirrors also makes it difficult for them to afford. In desperation, the project was forced to die.
In April of the following year, the restless Li Yizhou started a business on the women's track again, found 6 classmates and friends, formed a "Weimi" entrepreneurial team, and made a skin tester app and products designed for women. In September of the same year, Li Yizhou founded Keywu Technology Company. According to the data, KeyWu Technology has completed 3 rounds of financing. In 2016, TusStar Venture Capital, Zhizhuo Capital and Xia Ding Capital participated in Series A financing. From 2014 to 2015, KeyWin completed millions of dollars in Pre-A rounds and millions of yuan in angel round financing.
Although Li Yizhou has repeatedly claimed that he is not a trendsetter on the Internet, since then, Li Yizhou has consciously created his own personality. He is well aware of the influence that the title of "Dr. Tsinghua" brings to him.
From founding a company to going out to raise funds, and even when he went out to give speeches later, Dr. Tsinghua's status brought him resources and connections. And on all Internet social platforms, from Renren, Weibo, Douban, to Xiaohongshu and Douyin, Li Yizhou's most important label is also Dr. Tsinghua, and he also bluntly said, "Many people are coming for my Dr. Tsinghua, why don't I mention it? This is where my advantage lies." ”
Secondly, Li Yizhou knows how to catch the traffic password too well. From WeChat communities, small universe podcasts, to Douyin and Xiaohongshu live broadcasts, the topics he posts are the issues that ordinary people are most concerned about, such as entrepreneurship, side hustles, counterattacks, financial freedom, and even teaching others how to make popular videos and how to attract traffic.
Picture: Screenshot of Li Yizhou's Xiaohongshu topic
In 2020, Li Yizhou registered Knowledge Planet and officially started a paid community. The topic has extended from his entrepreneurial experience to various hot business topics, basically what is hot at the moment, he will talk about it. With the global explosion of ChatGPT in 2023, Li Yizhou decisively gave up the "ordinary people turn over" course with a monthly sales of millions and instead launched the 199 yuan "Everyone's Artificial Intelligence Lesson", which sold about 250,000 sets in one year, with sales of about 50 million yuan.
From the creation of character design, the selection of topic content to the timing of spending money on streaming, Li Yizhou and the team behind him have been carefully designed and considered, and they are also increasing their exposure when the topic is the hottest. From this point of view, he is indeed a smart speculator.
03 From Luo Zhenyu to Li Yizhou
In April 2020, Li Yizhou said when he replied to fans on his official account: The time and place are favorable, Lao Luo (Luo Zhenyu) seized the opportunity of the times, this is the intersection of sensitivity and years of accumulation, and I also see a similar opportunity.
Indeed, Li Yizhou also began to "transform" during this period, so as to move towards the road of knowledge payment.
In 2021, a group of bloggers who teach others to do Douyin will appear on Douyin, such as Toutou Sugar, Dalan, Sea Cucumber, Dong Shiyi, Lone Wolf, etc., these Douyin Internet celebrities who have made a lot of money are all people who teach others to make Douyin. At that time, Li Yizhou also began to sell the teaching course "One Boat One Lesson" on Douyin, and successfully realized 2300w in 4 months. Today, three years later, Li Yizhou has successfully realized 5000w with his AI course.
Now Li Yizhou has been hammered, but few people know that this is not the first time Li Yizhou has been hammered.
In 2022, after Li Yizhou fought with e-commerce blogger Xiaoguan, the effect of selling classes plummeted. Because the controversy was too big, only 300,000 courses were sold in May of that year, and many users thought that Li Yizhou was a liar and asked for a refund. "The quality of Li Yizhou's classes is not very good, and his peers can't look down on him", Wang Jing, a knowledge blogger who has earned more than one million a month by selling classes, said in an interview with Tech Planet, "But his traffic is better than other peers, so it is inevitable that his peers will hate him."
There was even such a statement on the Internet: Li Yizhou left Beijing because of the failure of his business, the company closed down and had a debt of 10 million, and he was really helpless, and he was scolded by his wife while filming videos in the back mountain, and he did not look glamorous and powerful on the surface.
is also a knowledge paid blogger, and to a certain extent, he sells anxiety, and he is saddled with the infamy of cutting leeks, and stands out in the knowledge payment track, Li Yizhou is indeed like Lao Luo, seizing the opportunity of his own times and highly binding the commercialization model to his personal IP.
However, now, the prestige and traffic supported by the same personal IP are also supported by personal IP, and on the same knowledge payment track, the pioneers Luo Zhenyu and Li Yizhou obviously made two choices.
On December 21, 2022, Luo Zhenyu, who has been doing Luo Ji Thinking for 10 years, officially went offline. When everyone is still striving to become an Internet celebrity and strive to extend the life of Internet celebrity IP, Luo Zhenyu, the first generation of knowledge Internet celebrity, after 10 years of Internet celebrity, firmly moved towards "de-Luo Zhenyu", this kind of transformation of giving up "Luo Zhenyu" personal IP inevitably makes people think that it is a helpless move for his company to go public many times but fail. In an exclusive interview with 36 Krypton, Luo Zhenyu once said, "The matter of Internet celebrities, if you don't have a hundred days of popularity, you will eventually die." A thing that turns red in an instant, and the force of falling down is greater than you think. ”
Li Yizhou, who is now accepting the backlash of personal IP traffic, has long been prepared and chooses to accept this fate of falling down. When he was sprayed in 2022, Li Yizhou once expressed his attitude, "You have made money, and it is a lot of money, so you have to be sprayed as a matter of course." ”
Picture: Li Yizhou's Douyin window, video account window, and mini program products have all been removed from the shelves
After witnessing the real case of one of his bosses using 10-minute PPT to win Korean customers, Li Yizhou deeply understands that winning customers and making money is not just a matter of hard work, but a process of performance, which he calls "real performance". Although his remarks are now sprayed on the Internet, just like last year's self-media article titled "Who Still Remembers Luo Zhenyu", after the heat is over, who cares about his current predicament?
As long as there are enough people who need a guide, or dream of overtaking in corners through shortcuts, Li Yizhou will always have a market.
Li Yizhou's AI money-making performance has come to an end for the time being. But this is far from the end of the story.