Z Potentials

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seedance 2.0 is blowing up right now. video models have hit the "describe it, get it" stage and that reveals a new reality: different creators, wildly different results. learning video prompts isn't about technical hacks anymore it's creative vision, storytelling, directing, visual taste. i put together a seedance 2.0 prompt collection(13 so far, adding more as i find them): inspova.ai/collection/636… Inspiring prompts from @Alin_Reaper05 @Kokoboy886711 @CoffeeVectors @birdabo @FragZero @johnAGI168 @pewdenai @aimikoda @umesh_ai @umesh_ai ♥️

The boundary between reality and the virtual world is about to disappear. Imagine characters from Pokemon or Digimon coming to life—not on a screen, but right in front of you. You reach out, and they respond. Introducing X1. The first real-time interactive video model that brings imagination into reality. Built by the Xmax AI team from Tsinghua University. Let’s Play the World through AI. Repost & comment to join the X1 private beta (free).

🚀 Reimagining science with AI Agents — with @ashtonteng & @quinn_leng of @kepler_ai_ From GRAIL & Databricks to landing their first biotech client in 1 week, Kepler AI is building the “central nervous system” for research. Read the full story here: open.substack.com/pub/zpotential…

Redefining AI Agents: From Trial-and-Error to Long-Termism — with Wenfeng Wang @wellswfwang of @sheet0ai ! 🚀 Z Potentials sat down with Wenfeng Wang, founder and CEO of Sheet0.com, who is building the “Google for AI Agents.” With just two people on the team, they’ve already raised $5M to take on one of the hardest challenges in AI: making Agents actually useful in everyday workflows. From early pivots in 2023 to defining a long-term vision for how humans interact with intelligent software, Wang embodies the founder’s journey from speed-driven experimentation to disciplined persistence. 👉 Read the full article here: open.substack.com/pub/zpotential… 💡 In this exclusive interview, Wenfeng shares: “Chat is becoming the new front-end of this era. What limits it is real-time data. Whoever supplies that to models will become the ‘new back-end’ of the Agent era.” “Sheet0 positions itself as a Level-4 Data Agent: real-time acquisition and structured delivery of data. Users just state their need—we collect and organize it into tables, ready for analysis or visualization.” “Our biggest differentiation? Delivering results that are both fast and precise—100% accurate, 0 hallucination. We achieve this by breaking tasks down into interpretable, verifiable, and traceable workflow code.” “If we think of Agents as ‘people,’ then Sheet0 is like Google for Agents (laughs).” “Isn’t human existence itself proof of AGI? Intelligence is the outcome of natural laws at work. Nature already gave us the example—why doubt that models will keep progressing?” “AI moves fast. Everyone feels FOMO. But when something becomes widespread, you have to step onto the shore and ask: what is scarce?” 🧠 Read the full story from Z Potentials to see how Sheet0 is shaping the future of AI Agents.

Redefining Software Creation: From Web App to Revenue, in Hours — with the founders of Same.new! 🚀 Z Potentials met John Yang @johnjyang, co-founder of Same.new, who is transforming the AI development space by starting with something deceptively simple: web page duplication. Just 4 months after launch, they’ve already hit $3M ARR and empowered over 500,000 users. From building open-source frameworks in high school to fine-tuning frontier models at Morph Labs and sleeping on startup couches in SF, this team blends raw technical execution with real product obsession. Read the full article here: open.substack.com/pub/zpotential… 💡 In this exclusive interview, John shares the mindset driving Same.new’s velocity: “When GPT-2 came out in 2019, everyone in the machine learning academic world could feel it was something fundamentally different. I wanted to understand it. So I built some projects, like a music Transformer. Because I play the saxophone, I wanted to generate piano accompaniment for my sax performances. I created my own dataset and trained a small model. When I played the sax, it could generate simple piano backing. At the time, that was really cool!” “The core of entrepreneurship is ‘Just Work.’ My workflow is simple: write code, run it, and iterate fast. Honestly, I sometimes ship half-finished features just to get user data. Then I rapidly update based on production feedback.” “When developers build projects, copying someone else's work is actually a pretty common step. I figured automating that copying process might be a good market entry point—so I started coding. Two and a half months later, Same.new was live.” “The key to product lies in the application layer above the model. Ordinary users today don’t understand the concept of an ‘Agent’: they don’t know the boundaries of model capabilities, or how complex their own tasks really are, or how to break them into steps. When we run multiple Agents at once, how do they coordinate? How do they continuously interact with users in the process? Right now, we evaluate Agents based on accuracy, speed, and cost-effectiveness. In the future, there will be more dynamic metrics. Same’s Agents will feel more like ‘people’—not just programs.” “Currently, benchmarks for Agents are mostly based on individual tasks or unit tests, which is very limited. Think about hiring an employee: if they can only do a few known tasks, they’re not a great hire—you can’t sense a learning curve. Like humans, we’ll start evaluating Agents by putting them in unfamiliar scenarios and seeing how they handle tasks they’ve never done before. The most important factor? The Agent’s ability to generalize.” 🧠 Read the full story from Z Potentials to see how Same.new is helping users go from Make Web Apps to Make Money.

Redefining the Agent Stack: From Prompt to Production, in Days — with He Yan, founder of CoreSpeed Inc.! 🚀 Z Potentials met @miltonheyan, a Gen Z founder who dropped out to build @CoreSpeed_Inc, an Agent-native PaaS platform powering viral Agent products like DeckSpeed—which hit #1 on Product Hunt in just two weeks. From hacking radios and building Tesla coils in middle school to publishing SCI/SSCI papers and winning hackathons, Milton’s path combines raw engineering talent with a sharp entrepreneurial mindset. Read the full article here: open.substack.com/pub/zpotential… 🧠 In this exclusive interview, Milton shares how CoreSpeed is reshaping Agent infrastructure: “We’ve consistently followed one core principle: only work on things where we have a shot at achieving a 10x improvement—not just chase directions that look technically hard.” “Every company building Agents inevitably has to deal with container lifecycle management, user-level routing, and other orchestration tasks during deployment. These tasks are completely unrelated to the core logic of the Agent itself, and the required skill sets don’t align with those of Agent developers. That’s precisely why an infra-focused company is well-positioned to build the “wheel” once—turning every Agent company’s marginal cost into one company’s fixed cost.” “Building a smart Agent is no longer the hard part. The real challenge is getting it online—in other words, deploying it to the cloud. The reality is: most people can build an Agent, but they can’t deploy one, let alone scale it. The “last mile” problem is exactly what we’re here to solve.” “An Agent-native PaaS isn’t about “optimization” or “stacking another orchestration layer.” It’s about replacing legacy components that constrain Agent performance—and rebuilding infrastructure specifically for Agents from the ground up.” “Whether it’s product or growth, we’ve developed our own way of thinking. It’s rooted in deep, first-principles understanding of the “why,” which gives us a raw, relentless edge in the “how.” And I love that.” 💡 Read the full story from Z Potentials to explore how CoreSpeed is powering the next wave of intelligent, production-grade AI Agents.

🤔 Revolutionary Product Designing Principles from Tao Chen and Yuzhe Qin, co-founders of Dexmate! 💡 Z Potentials met @taochenshh and @QinYuzhe , who co-founded @DexmateAI , a startup focused on AI-powered robotic hands. With deep research backgrounds on robotics, SLAM, reinforcement leanering, at leading labs from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, MIT, CMU, UCSD, the duo brings both technical expertise and a clear understanding of industry needs. Read the full article here: lnkd.in/exTD39ZF 🦾 In this exclusive interview, Chen and Qin bring forth that: Robotic hand isn’t about mimicking the human hand’s appearance—what matters is replicating its capabilities. An ideal dexterous hand should be like a human one: a rigid skeletal core wrapped in soft material. This hybrid design ensures both strong gripping force and high load capacity, while soft surfaces improve friction and tactile precision. Dexmate emphasizes hardware-software co-design. From day one, they engineered the hardware with downstream AI model training and deployment in mind—a key differentiator for us. At the algorithm level, Dexmate is a strong advocates of sim-to-real strategies, blending synthetic and real-world data for more robust task execution. The company aim to leverage existing datasets to accelerate the generation of new training data, allowing the data flywheel to spin at an exponential rate. Building robots is like running a marathon. You need more than just short bursts of brilliance—you need long-term stamina and persistence. Robotics is a deeply interdisciplinary field that requires patience and resilience. ⚡️Read the full article from Z Potentials to get a glimpse of the future dexterous robotic hands and how Dexmate will bring them there.

🚀 Inspiring thoughts from Baoping Wang, founder of You Mind!! 💭 Z Potentials is thrilled to feature Baoping, Alibaba’s former frontend tech lead and Yuque founder, who resigns from ByteDance exec role to launch AI-powered content creation tool, which secures nearly $10M in seed funding. 🖊️In this exclusive interview, Baoping shared openly about: Whether you’re launching a startup or driving innovation within a large company, it all comes down to finding gaps in the market—those overlooked spaces others tend to ignore. In the long run, YouMind’s mission is to become the “pen and paper of the AI era.” Over the next 6 to 18 months, the focus is more defined: a writing and research tool tailored to creators working on medium- to long-form content. When talking about the AI era, he believes some fundamentals remain unchanged—like the need to truly understand users and their real-world scenarios. For creators of AI applications, it’s essential to take a product management approach similar to that of the internet era: focus on the user, understand their context, and keep a close feedback loop. Because AI is full of uncertainties, product managers who don’t fully grasp the technology may easily get off track. They might overestimate what AI can do and end up building impressive-looking demos that have little real-world value. Baoping's long-term vision for YouMind? Perhaps in ten years, it might grow into a new kind of YouTube for the AI age. YouMind imagines a tool that starts as “pen and paper,” but the content you write could eventually become interactive and playable. A single “playable page” might evolve into a video, and a collection of those might form a next-generation YouTube. Wherever you are in your career, whatever you’re doing, you should reflect on what you’re good at and what you truly enjoy. The two may not always align, but knowing even one of them is a good start. If you’re still unsure—just start doing something concrete. Don’t overthink it. In his own path—from engineering to product to management—He’s always known his strengths but didn’t always know what he loved. First, master what you’re good at. And if you’re lucky enough to discover what truly excites you—go for it. When you’re doing something you genuinely love, you don’t need to justify it. That unspoken joy is the proof. If you need to find reasons to convince yourself, then maybe it’s not real. Read the full interview here: lnkd.in/ePkD7yc4

🚀 Exciting Insights from #XiaodiHou, Founder of #BotAuto & Former CEO of TuSimple! ⭐ Z Potentials Meet Xiaodi Hou: from Caltech labs to the Nasdaq bell with TuSimple, and now onto a new journey with Bot Auto. In this exclusive conversation, he reflects on the hard truths of autonomy, the shift from technical demos to operational realities, and why first principles — not flashy metrics — drive lasting value. Read the full interview here: lnkd.in/ecbnUXBp 🔍 In this exclusive interview, Xiaodi opens up about: “If this were the last decision of my life, would I regret it?” This single question has guided Xiaodi’s boldest choices and shaped the ethos behind Bot Auto. The world is tilting toward disruption, fast. That’s exactly when you swing big. Bot Auto skipped the incremental route and went straight for L4. Why? Because it’s easier to move down from L4 to L2 than to claw your way up the other way. Phase 1: Deep learning made perception reliable. Phase 2: Detection became a commodity. Phase 3: Foundation models — not just end-to-end for buzz, but to solve problems holistically, with multi-task, multi-modal capabilities. Autonomous driving today is where the steam engine once stood, not just a technical breakthrough, but a reordering of how organizations operate. Bot Auto cut labeling costs to 2% of previous methods by leveraging LLM-based pretraining at scale. Xiaodi isn’t just building a business — he’s building a “coral reef” company. A logistics infrastructure that grows the market, brings others in, and plays the long game on impact. 👀 Read the full interview on Z Potentials to explore Xiaodi’s take on how to strip autonomy of its last illusions and build what actually works.

🚀 Exciting Insights from Yuchi Ma, Founder of 2033 Tech! ✨ After Tecent Acquisition, Yuchi Ma Built an AIGC Platform Achieving 2-Hour Daily User Engagement and 10%+ Payment Conversions Z Potentials Meet Yuchi Ma: From founding Trio.ai—a B2B2C AI startup later acquired by Tencent—to launching 2033 Tech, Yuchi has always been at the frontline of AI innovation. In this exclusive conversation, he shares his entrepreneurial philosophy, lessons learned across two waves of AI, and his vision for building a next-generation AIGC interactive platform focused on Gen Z users. Read the full interview here: lnkd.in/eZkJfSiP 🔍 In this exclusive interview, Yuchi opens up about: "If simply following the crowd and replicating so-called success stories with guaranteed results, there would be no such thing as innovation or failure." "The value of a startup isn’t determined by capital; it’s because a company has real commercial value that capital follows." "At every stage a company aspires to reach, there will always be a shortage of time, people, and money." "The original intention of entrepreneurship is simple: do what you truly believe in, and create real value." "From Trio.ai to 2033 Tech, our mission is to let users truly experience what consumer-facing AIGC can do." "The goal of a ToC (consumer-facing) product is to attract as many users as possible—low entry barriers, minimal explanation." "You should build a “better” experience for users in the moment, not chase some abstract idea of the “best.” "No matter how fast technology evolves, what makes a product truly matter is whether users find it fun and worth their time and money." "Interest is the user’s primary motivation. It’s the core assumption behind our vision for 2033." "I don’t separate work and life. The thrill I seek comes from building startups." 👀 Read the full interview on Z Potentials to explore how Yuchi Ma is building a platform that empowers users to create their own 3D worlds, characters, and stories and why he believes the next frontier of AIGC will be interest-driven and interaction-centered. #Entrepreneurship #AIGC #ArtificialIntelligence #StartupJourney #ConsumerTech #AIInnovation #UserExperience #FoundersMindset #ZPotentials #2033Tech

Z Newsletter | Why ARR Is Broken for AI Startups TL;DR: ARR was built for a world of predictable, high-margin SaaS. AI is a different beast—volatile, expensive, and still in flux. Until a new standard emerges, investors and founders alike should treat ARR-based AI valuations with extreme caution. In this new wave of digital infrastructure, it's not just about how fast you grow—it’s about what you’re actually building. open.substack.com/pub/zpotential…

Z Newsletter | An overwhelming wave of traffic crashes onto DHgate Legacy Chinese E-Commerce Platform DHgate Surges to #2 on U.S. App Store Amid Tariff Turmoil and Viral TikTok Buzz open.substack.com/pub/zpotential…

Z Newsletter | Products of the Week (4.14-4.20) open.substack.com/pub/zpotential…

Z Newsletter | Tariff Disputes Escalate, CATL's Hong Kong Listing Faces Setbacks on April 18, JPMorgan informed some institutional investors who planned to subscribe to CATL’s Hong Kong shares that the company’s IPO, originally scheduled for the last week of April to early May, has been postponed. open.substack.com/pub/zpotential…

Z Newsletter | Products of the Week (4.14-4.20) TOP1: Mailgo TOP2：Scrimba Fullstack TOP3: Whatting zpotentials.substack.com/p/z-potentials…

Z Potentials News | Robots Race with Humans in Half Marathon ​ On April 19, an inaugural Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon was held, marking a significant milestone in robotics and artificial intelligence.Twenty-one humanoid robots competed alongside over 12,000 human runners on parallel tracks, showcasing advancements in bipedal robot mobility.​ open.substack.com/pub/zpotential…

🚀 Exclusive insights from Zhenyu Shen, founder of @TensorArt, serial entrepreneur🌟 Z Potentials Meet Zhenyu Shen: from his time at Peking University and journey as founder of groundbreaking art toy platform and decision-maker of world-leading AIGC platform. link to interview: lnkd.in/edA5mZFU 🔍 In this exclusive interview, Zhenyu discloses his perspective on: "Every company will eventually become an AI company. There will no longer be a distinction between AI and non-AI companies, because AI will transform every aspect of how we build products and solve problems." "Tensor.Art is essentially our company Echo Tech’s ticket into the AI world. Through this entry point, we aim to establish our place in the AI ecosystem—both in the community and in model infrastructure." "95% of the model trainers on our platform don’t know how to code. As long as they’re interested in AIGC and understand some basic principles, they can train valuable models." "One key trigger for us to build Tensor.Art was the standardization of two core aspects of AI: the runtime environment for algorithms and the file format for models." "In the long run, the moat of a model-centric community will mainly lie in two dimensions: the scale of the models and the scale of the creators." "Chatbots and today’s agents are not the final form of AI applications. Future interactions will be more frequent, more fragmented, and capable of self-iteration." "AI technology will eventually become as fundamental and widespread as water and electricity—just like web technologies 20 years ago. Open-source and closed-source models will coexist, but the open-source model is more conducive to attracting global talent to participate in the AI revolution." "The “begin with the end in mind” mindset enables us to cut through short-term noise and see the things that are bound to happen, even if many people either aren’t ready to face them or think it’s still too early." 👀 Read the full interview from Z Potentials to get a glimpse of the future of AI and how AI products should be positioned in alignment with the trend. #AIGC #TensorArt #AIProducts