The True Advantage of Capital

"Then why did you call me?"

Zhang Yiming was a bit confused.

If it wasn't to ask him to take down the video, what exactly was this young President Chen up to?

"I wanted to ask you to push more traffic to this kind of video. Let's make it even more popular."

The other end of the line went quiet for two seconds.

"President Chen, did I hear that right? You want me to boost the videos smearing you?"

"You heard right."

"Aren't you afraid the public opinion will affect your company?"

"President Zhang, there is currently no AI company in the world better than ours."

Zhang Yiming stayed silent for a moment, then suddenly laughed.

"Haha, President Chen, you really are full of youthful vigor. Alright, I'll do as you say and give it a push."

"Thanks, President Zhang. I don't have time right now, so I won't invite you to dinner."

"?"

Chen Zhi hung up the phone.

Dai Damai stood across the desk, having listened to the entire call. The expression on his face shifted from doubt to confusion, and from confusion to pure bewilderment.

"President Chen, you asked him to boost the smear pieces?"

"Yeah."

"Did I misunderstand something?"

Chen Zhi placed his phone face down on the desk and leaned back in his chair.

"First, finish telling me what you found."

Dai Damai looked down and swiped on his tablet.

"The blogger is named 'Geek Lao Zhou'. He started out doing digital reviews and has never touched AI-related content before. We checked his MCN network, and he recently received a three million yuan remittance."

"The source?"

"A shell company in the Cayman Islands. It was registered last month with a capital of ten thousand dollars and has no actual business operations. It's obviously a paid troll army hired by our competitors."

Chen Zhi motioned for him to continue.

Dai Damai kept scrolling.

"There's one more thing. The big tech giants have been making a lot of moves lately. Qiandu just released their large model last week, Ali followed up with a wave of upgrades, and not to mention Sogou and 360. They've been participating in all sorts of third-party evaluations and grabbing a bunch of messy titles."

"What titles?"

"'Most Innovative AI Product Award,' 'Best Large Model Application of the Year,' 'AI Pioneer Enterprise'... Anyway, they're the kind of bogus awards you can get on as long as you pay."

Dai Damai flipped the tablet around to show Chen Zhi.

The screen was densely packed with the PR moves of seven or eight tech giants over the past month. Press conferences, evaluations, awards, and media placements—all together, they had thrown at least several hundred million into promotional fees.

"You should be able to see what they're doing," Dai Damai said, closing the tablet. "Compared to these giants, as a startup, we don't have their stable traffic channels. If this wave of public opinion hits us, it will be very detrimental."

Chen Zhi listened and nodded.

Everything Dai Damai said was the truth.

This was the true advantage of the big players in the capital game. Their most terrifying aspect was never how advanced their technology was, but rather that they held an original user pool of hundreds of millions of daily active users and stable channels for traffic exposure.

Make a beautiful PowerPoint, invite a few experts to endorse it at the press conference, edit a flashy promo video, and the users will naturally come.

As for whether the product is actually good to use?

Most ordinary users couldn't tell the difference at all.

What do they use AI for? Nothing more than searching for information, asking a few simple questions, or generating a weekly report template. Any large language model with a generic wrapper could scrape by and handle these needs.

And these ordinary users were precisely the most stable source of income.

They didn't care about the architecture of your underlying algorithms, they didn't care if the reasoning speed was fractions of a second faster, and they certainly didn't care whose tech was better. They only looked at who had the most ads, whose name was familiar, and whose app ranked highest in the app store.

To put it bluntly, the tech giants were fighting a war of information asymmetry.

They used overwhelming advertising to package half-finished products as completed ones, leveraging their traffic advantage to squeeze the survival space of startups. Once your user growth was choked off and investors couldn't see the data, you would eventually either have to sell out or die.

This combination of punches was the true weapon of capital. Although shameless, it was incredibly effective.

"So," Dai Damai stared at Chen Zhi, "what exactly are you thinking? Having someone boost the smear campaigns, isn't that just throwing dirty water on ourselves?"

"Do you think what that video said makes sense?"

Dai Damai paused for a moment.

"...Partially. We really haven't published peer-reviewed papers, nor have we open-sourced our code. But you know the technical depth of Moss better than I do."

"Right, we know it ourselves," Chen Zhi spun his chair around to face Dai Damai. "But the users don't."

"So?"

"So let them curse us."

Dai Damai hesitated, wanting to speak but stopping himself.

Chen Zhi stood up and walked to the window. The view from the twentieth floor of the ICC was expansive, with the cluster of CBD office buildings reflecting the sunlight.

"The harsher they curse, the lower the users' expectations will be. The lower the expectations, the greater the contrast will be when they actually get to use Moss."

Dai Damai chewed on those words.

"You want to use the product experience to slap them in the face?"

"Pretty much."

"But the problem is, how do we get ordinary users to actually use Moss?" Chen Zhi turned around. "Relying purely on app downloads, we can't compete with the tech giants' one-two punch of pre-installations and app store recommendations. We need a carrier."

Dai Damai frowned. "What carrier?"

"We're going to build a smartphone."

Dai Damai was shocked.

"What did you say?"

"Build a smartphone."

"...President Chen, did you not sleep well last night?"

"I am very awake."

"Build a smartphone?" Dai Damai said in disbelief. "We are an AI company, not a smartphone manufacturer. Building a phone requires a supply chain, industrial design, production lines, distribution channels—"

"Those are all problems that money can solve."

"Money can solve them, but what about time? From project initiation to mass production, it will take at least a year and a half, and that's assuming everything goes smoothly."

Chen Zhi didn't argue. Instead, he asked a question.

"Have you ever used the voice assistant on any smartphone currently on the market?"

Dai Damai paused. "I have... occasionally."

"How was the experience?"

"...It leaves a lot to be desired."

"Right." Chen Zhi walked back to his desk and sat down. "Siri has been out for over a decade, and it's still mentally handicapped. Xiaoai only knows how to tell jokes and control home appliances. Samsung's Bixby isn't even worth mentioning; the global consensus is that users just can't find where the turn-off button is."

"Why are all the voice assistants from smartphone manufacturers garbage?" Chen Zhi asked and answered his own question. "Because their AI capabilities aren't enough. What they do is keyword matching and preset commands, not true intelligent interaction."

"But Moss can."

Dai Damai finished the thought.

Coming from a technical background, he understood Moss's underlying capabilities better than anyone.

What Moss could do, no other AI product currently on the market could achieve.

It could understand context, remember user habits and preferences, and accurately grasp intentions across multiple rounds of dialogue. Stuffing this into a smartphone would make it far more than just a 'voice assistant'.

That was a true, living intelligent agent that could actually hold a conversation with you.

"You want to turn Moss into a smartphone operating system?" Dai Damai asked.

"Not an operating system," Chen Zhi shook his head. "I want to make Moss the brain of the phone. We will do deep integration at the system level. Every single action a user takes on their phone, Moss will be able to step in, optimize, and learn. From taking pictures to navigation, from checking the calendar to shopping, from typing to socializing, all scenarios will be seamlessly connected."

"You want to keep users immersed in the Moss ecosystem twenty-four hours a day."

"Exactly."

Dai Damai hugged the tablet to his chest, falling silent for about half a minute.

"Technically, it is feasible," he finally spoke. "Moss's inference engine is lightweight enough now, so on-device deployment wouldn't be a problem at all. But as for building a smartphone... supply chains, quality control, after-sales service, distribution channels, we do not know the first thing about any of that."

"Which is exactly why we need to find people who do."

"Who?"

Chen Zhi picked up his phone and scrolled through his contacts.

"Sometimes, the enemy of an enemy can become a friend."