Just now, the throne of Asia’s richest man has changed.
According to the latest data from the Bloomberg Rich List: 43-year-old ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming’s personal worth has officially exceeded US$105 billion, equivalent to more than 740 billion yuan.
what does that mean? Not only did he surpass Indian energy tycoon Adani and become the richest man in Asia, he also reached 18th place on the global rich list.
Also worthy of attention is the speed at which Zhang Yiming’s wealth grows – in 2019, when he was first included in Bloomberg’s list of rich people to track, his net worth was “only” US$13 billion. In just 7 years, it has increased 7 times! This is equivalent to a net profit of 100 billion yuan per year.
More importantly: Zhang Yiming is the first richest man in Asian business history to rely on AI technology to occupy the top spot.
The significance of this matter is greater than any wealth figure.
Don’t believe it? Let’s take a look at what the richest man in Asia did in the past.
Li Ka-shing made semi-monopoly money by franchising land, ports and public utilities;
Masayoshi Son of SoftBank plays venture capital. If he bets right, he will be worth a hundred times as much, but if he bets wrong, everyone will repay the debt together;
Tadashi Yanai of Uniqlo is essentially engaged in offline retail, selling cost-effective clothes all over the world;
Adani in India is engaged in infrastructure and energy – the least technical business.
Do you understand? In the past decade or so, Asia’s richest man’s net worth of hundreds of billions has been anchored in land, cement, cotton, coal, oil, and finance, all of which are traditional industries.
阿達尼
Only Zhang Yiming is different.
Not a penny of his 740 billion comes from bricks or minerals, but is solidly built on the technical moat of algorithm distribution and artificial intelligence.
Many people will say that Zhang Yiming reached the top because he is personally awesome. But if you zoom out a little further, you’ll find that things are not that simple.
This year’s Hurun Global Rich List, China’s wealth has increased the most, all of which are AI-related companies: Zhang Yiming’s wealth increased by more than 130 billion a year; Cambrian’s Chen Tianshi’s wealth doubled; Wang Weixiu, the owner of Zhongji InnoLight, which makes optical modules, saw his wealth increase nearly five times.
What does this mean? This shows that the momentum of China’s economic growth has parted ways with the traditional paths of Japan and India, and has taken the lead in switching to a new track driven by AI.
The Indians are still mining coal to generate electricity, the Japanese are still selling clothes, and the Chinese have begun to use algorithms and computing power to collect “technology taxes” from the world.
Cambrian Chen Tianshi
It stands to reason that, sitting in the position of the richest man, you should strike while the iron is hot and crazily improve your own AI rankings, right? Zhang Yiming didn’t.
Just last month, the founder, who almost never showed up, made a rare appearance at the all-member meeting of the Byte Seed team and said only one thing:Insist on originality and refuse distillation.
What is distillation? It means using the output of other people’s more advanced large models to train your own model. Quick results, low cost, and good ranking figures are the tacit “shortcuts” in the domestic AI circle.
Zhang Yiming’s original words were: Byte should be willing to sacrifice some short-term interests for the longer-term goal. When making models, we must adhere to long-termism, rather than using other people’s output for temporary list rankings.
Byte strictly prohibits distillation of open source models internally, and even uses API detection to block this road.
CEO Liang Rubo later publicly admitted at the all-member meeting: The large language model has indeed been widened overseas – but accept short-term backwardness and do not deform its actions.
Can you believe it? One company openly admitted that it was “behind” but was determined not to cut corners. It is said that Zhang Yiming now spends half of his working time in the Seed team, sitting in on core technology reviews and staying up late reading AI papers.
As a result, this seemingly “stupid” technological long-termism has resulted in Asia’s richest man being worth hundreds of billions.
What cards does Zhang Yiming hold in his hand? Let’s have a final plate.
Doubao has 345 million monthly active users, and the average daily token calls exceed 120 trillion; the annual revenue of Byte’s large model business has reached 4 billion US dollars, exceeding the sum of all other domestic model companies.
The video generation model Seedance directly transformed China’s short drama industry from live-action filming to AI production last year. Even the market left by OpenAI’s shutdown of Sora was eaten up by it, accounting for half of overseas calls.
Seedance 2.5, just released on July 31, can generate a 30-second video in a single time and multiple rounds of extensions to produce a complete work of several minutes. Manufacturing and robotics companies such as XCMG, Xiaopeng, and Zhiyuan are queuing up to access it.
The new version that is about to be launched will also bring a 3D white model preview function – before filming a movie, use AI to preview the entire scene. The production method of the film and television industry may be completely rewritten.
In the first half of the year, Byte’s revenue was approximately US$120 billion, a year-on-year increase of 30%; the company’s valuation increased from US$330 billion to more than US$600 billion.
So you see, the number 740 billion is not the point at all.
The point is: this change of Asia’s richest man is essentially a handover of industrial power. From land to cement, from oil to retail, today, for the first time, this scepter is in the hands of AI.
When wealth begins to be priced by algorithms instead of pricing land, it means times have really changed.
Zhang Yiming, the richest man in Asia, is in a sense the person who opened the door to this new era.
參考資料
Financial News: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming becomes Asia’s richest man
ZAKER: $105 billion! Zhang Yiming, 43, becomes Asia’s richest man
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