Funding the Future | Navigating China's EV Success & AI Acceleration with Murong Yang

🚀 From Li Auto to AGI: What’s Next for China’s Innovation Wave?

Future Capital backed Li Auto pre-product. It’s now a $30B company.It also invested in MiniMax—8 months before ChatGPT launched.

These were more than bets—they were signals of where the future is headed.

🔋 1. The EV Revolution: From Hardware to Embodied AI

Three phases have already unfolded:

Phase 1: Electrification → solid-state batteries, perovskite

Phase 2: Automation → lidar, autonomous driving

Next: AI-native vehicles

The battleground has shifted. It’s no longer hardware—it’s intelligence.

🧠 2. China's “Six Tigers” (LLMs) & the Post-DeepSeek Landscape

Baichuan pivoted to verticals like healthcare

01.AI’s model team got absorbed into Alibaba

The rest? Still in the AGI race—but compute + capital are massive bottlenecks

Then there’s MiniMax

Only 2–3 LLMs will survive. The rest? They’ll evolve into specialized agents.

🌏 3. From ‘China for China’ to ‘China for the World’

This is a new wave of builders—born local, building global.