AI Mania Makes ByteDance Cofounder Zhang Yiming China’s Richest Person
“All China tech assets staged a big rebound off the low base,” Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm 86Research, says by WeChat.
ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming has become China’s richest man as investors bet on companies with AI potential. Zhang’s fortune has grown to $65.5 billion, ahead of beverage giant Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan’s $56.5 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Zhang, 41, derives his net worth from a 21% stake in the privately held tech behemoth, although he stepped down as chairman in 2021 after resigning as chief executive earlier that year.
In secondary markets, ByteDance’s valuation varies from $240 billion to over $400 billion, which is what some of its major investors including Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price Group believe the TikTok parent to be worth. Forbes thinks the company has a valuation of $312 billion, based on a recent share buyback program as well as conversations with analysts and a separate ByteDance investor who prefers not to be named.
That amount marks a more-than-40% jump from 2024, when certain private market investors were only willing to acquire ByteDance shares at a price that would suggest a $217 billion valuation. The company got a tailwind from the seemingly improving TikTok situation in the U.S., after President Donald Trump said he would probably extend the April 5 deadline for the popular short video platform to be sold or banned, Glen Anderson, cofounder and CEO of U.S.-based broker-dealer Rainmaker Securities, says by email.
Trump said on Sunday that he was negotiating with different U.S. buyers for a stake in TikTok, and a deal might come soon. In the meantime, investors have grown optimistic about the outlook for the country’s large technology companies, including ByteDance. They are encouraged by the government’s friendlier stance toward private-sector businesses and the country’s AI advances despite U.S. attempts to thwart them with export controls. The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks the performance of such companies as Alibaba and Tencent, soared 80% over the past 12 months.
More on AI mania making ByteDance founder China’s richest man
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UPCOMING INTERVIEW ON THE (A)BSOLUTELY (I)NCREDIBLE PODCAST
I’m expanding the (A)bsolutely (I)ncredible Podcast to include interviews with thought leaders who are passionately working on revolutionary transformation, powered by AI.
On the inaugural episode, I welcomed Theodora Lau, the Founder of Unconventional Ventures, and author of a the new book being released by Palgrave Macmillan.
The complete interview will be posted soon on the (A)bsolutely (I)ncredible podcast.
Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence: Navigating the Realities of AI in Financial Services. Theodora has been recognized as one American Banker’s Top 20 most influential women in Fintech, and the host of the amazing One Vision Podcast.
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As an author of multiple books on the future of finance this should be an interesting and insightful interview thats available to all our Neural News Network subscribers.
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How Long Will AI’s Free-Trial Era Last?
Every big consumer tech cycle has its free-trial era … In the 2010s, the VC-backed lose-money-to-make-money strategy returned to the physical world, with services like Uber (and a hundred Uber-fors) hemorrhaging money on underpriced taxis, food delivery, and DTC goods in a multibillion-dollar experiment in customer acquisition memorialized as a fleeting “millennial lifestyle subsidy.” As with just about everything else, after 2020, things, you know, got a little hazy for a while — although you might argue that low interest rates produced so many examples of unsustainably priced services and goods that it’s hard to pick just one.
Most free (and ad-free) social-media apps failed, but a few of them became so dominant that they can now add as much friction and advertising to their products as they want, making longtime users nostalgic for how they used to be. A lot of Uber-type businesses failed, but Uber made it through. Rides cost more because Uber needs to charge more and can, even if longtime riders remember paying $15 for what’s now a $50 ride.
In 2025, we’re somewhere in the front half of a historically massive tech-investment cycle in and around AI, and the pattern is showing signs of repeating. An “interesting situation has returned where free-to-access AI is very close to the frontier,” writes Wharton professor and AI evangelist Ethan Mollick. There are nearly as many pricing strategies in AI as there are AI products to pay for — subscriptions, ads, metered usage, and combinations of all three — and the products themselves are complicated, tiered, and broadly unfamiliar.
Still, if you’re looking for it, you can see the outline of a familiar situation: OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and smaller firms like Anthropic are losing massive amounts of money by giving away their AI products or selling them at a loss. “We are in the era of $5 Uber rides anywhere across San Francisco but for LLMs,” wrote early OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy in response to Mollick, “weee.” Chatbots are free, programming assistance is cheap, and attention-grabbing, money-losing AI toys are everywhere. AI is in its free(ish) trial era.
More on AI’s free trial era in the New York Intelligencer
Building Lovable | $10M ARR In 60 Days With 15 People | Anton Osika, CEO
Anton Osika is the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, which is building what they call “the last piece of software”—an AI-powered tool that turns descriptions into working products without requiring any coding knowledge.
Since launching three months ago, Lovable hit $4 million ARR in the first four weeks and $10 million ARR in two months with a team of just 15 people, making it Europe’s fastest-growing startup ever.
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Foxconn Built FoxBrain, Its Own AI Model
Foxconn, facing challenges in its core electronics manufacturing business has been diversifying into areas such as AI and electric vehicles.
The world’s largest contract electronics maker, Foxconn, said Monday it has built its own large language model with reasoning capabilities, developed in-house and trained in four weeks.
Initially designed for internal use within the company, the artificial-intelligence model, called FoxBrain, is capable of data analysis, mathematics, reasoning and code generation, the company said. Foxconn said Nvidia provided support through its Taiwan-based supercomputer and technical consulting, enabling successful model training.
The company said it intends to open-source the model for collaborations with industry partners. It envisions FoxBrain driving advancements in manufacturing and supply-chain management. The model “prioritized optimized training strategies over simply throwing computing power” at the problem, said Yung-Hui Li, director of Foxconn’s artificial intelligence research center. Using 120 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units, Li’s team finished training FoxBrain in about four weeks, the company said.
Foxconn, best known for assembling Apple’s iPhones, has released some parameters of FoxBrain. The company said further information would be revealed at Nvidia’s annual technology event in mid-March. The company said FoxBrain, which is based on the structure of Meta’s publicly available large language model Llama 3.1, is Taiwan’s first large language model with advanced reasoning.
More on Foxconn’s FoxBrain on The Wall Street Journal
Runway Smashes AI Video, New Feature
Runway Gen-3 just dropped a GAME-CHANGING feature: Style Transfer for video. This lets you take the style of ANY image and apply it to your video's first frame, influencing the entire clip. We're diving deep into how it works, exploring its limitations, and uncovering some powerful workflows you can use RIGHT NOW.
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The Great Software Rewiring: AI Isn’t Just Eating Everything; It Is Everything
Once upon a time, software ate the world. Now, AI is here to digest what’s left. The old model of computing, where apps ruled, marketplaces controlled access and platforms took their cut, is unraveling. What’s emerging is an AI-first world where software functions aren’t trapped inside apps but exist as dynamic, on-demand services accessible through AI-native interfaces.
For decades, computing has been a glorified filing cabinet. Applications were digital folders, self-contained, rigid and walled off from one another. Want to check the weather? Open an app. Need to book a flight? Another app. Pay a bill? Yet another. The result? A fragmented user experience where we toggle between countless silos, each competing for real estate on a home screen.
Generative AI breaks this model. Instead of clicking and tapping through individual programs, users will interact with intelligent agents that dynamically retrieve, process and generate responses in real time, no app required. Ask a single AI assistant to manage travel, optimize finances and recommend a workout routine? Done. Need legal documents reviewed while ordering groceries and summarizing today’s news? Seamless. The new interface is not an app. It is conversational, predictive and frictionless.
To be fair, this new world of functional intelligence is not yet entirely ready. Apps are not disappearing overnight, but their grip on computing may well be slipping. AI doesn’t care about pre-packaged software silos. It rewires the experience, making software modular, dynamic and deeply integrated. The entire idea of opening and switching between apps? That is going to quickly feel like legacy thinking.
More about AI being everything on VentureBeat
AI Agents And The Future Of Work With LangChain’s Harrison Chase | AI Basics
In this episode: Jason sits down with Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, to explore how AI-powered agents are transforming the way startups operate. They discuss the shift from traditional entry-level roles to AI-driven automation, the importance of human-in-the-loop systems, and the future of AI-powered assistants in business.
Harrison shares insights on how companies like Replit, Klarna, and GitLab are leveraging AI agents to streamline operations, plus a look ahead at what's next for AI-driven workflows. Brought to you in partnership with Google Cloud.
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