Dialogue with Chang Chai, the founder of Unbounded AI: The entrepreneurial opportunities of AI are at the application layer丨Innovator

Author｜Yu Huiru Editor｜Liu Yu

The lowering of technical thresholds has spawned a large number of AI painting startups, which also means fierce competition. Unbounded AI, who is among them, has personal experience of this.

Currently, the number of Unbounded AI users is less than 3 million, which is still far from the annual goal of 10 million. Chang Chai, the founder of Wujie AI, said bluntly that user growth has entered a climbing period and will continue to work hard in the second half of the year. The sluggish growth of unbounded AI is a microcosm of the industry.

As an emerging field, the AI ​​painting industry is changing rapidly. At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference a week ago, Alibaba Cloud added a new member to its Tongyi series of large models - Tongyi Wanxiang, which is positioned as a large model for AI painting creation. In addition to Alibaba, large models launched by Baidu, iFlytek, SenseTime and other companies all have multi-modal functions such as Vincent graphics.

This means that the infrastructure in the field of AI painting is becoming more and more popular. In fact, after the Stable Diffusion model was open sourced, the threshold for Vincentian painting business has been lowered a lot, and a large number of AI painting startups have been born in China. Unbounded AI is a startup company that grew up in this wave. It started from the "community as a service" model and iteratively optimized step by step in community operations.

Competition is becoming increasingly fierce. At the end of March this year, Midjourney, the most popular AI painting company in the industry, released the V5 version, which iterated the generation effect of realistic-style images to "photo-level". The battle for survival has begun in the field of AI painting.

The prospect of AI painting is extremely attractive. According to Guotai Junan Research Report, by 2025, the penetration rate of AI painting in the field of image content generation will reach 30%, and the market size will exceed 200 billion yuan.

Temptations and challenges go hand in hand, and only those with the best will come out on top. As a science fiction writer who has won the "Galaxy Award" for Chinese science fiction three times in a row, Chang Chai's real name is Liu Zhipeng. How will he lead Unbounded AI to break out of the siege? His answer is: "In the field of AI generation, more opportunities for domestic startups will appear in the application layer."

The following is the content of the conversation between All Weather Technology and Changchai, compiled by All Weather Technology:

“The application of AI painting is still concentrated in the marketing field”

All Weather Technology: How many users do you currently have?

Changchai: Our number of users is now close to 3 million. We do not make small programs, we mainly focus on APP users, supplemented by website users. Originally, our goal this year was to reach 10 million users, but in the past few months, we have entered a climbing period. The growth of user data is not as fast as when AIGC first became popular. We are still far from the goal of 10 million. We will continue to work hard in the second half of the year. .

All-Weather Technology: How many paying users can it account for?

长铗：The C end is 20%. We have 15 free drawing quotas for each user every day. Many users come for the free daily quota, and we welcome them. For the C-side, we hope to establish unbounded industry influence. Revenue mainly depends on To B.

All Weather Technology: In the first half of this year, many powerful manufacturers entered the field of AI generation. What kind of pressure did it bring to you?

Chang Chai:We don’t regard it as pressure. Everyone’s playing style is different and their positioning is also different. The AI ​​painting tools of major manufacturers are generally positioned as self-contained systems and are not connected with the open community represented by SD (Stable Diffusion). The prompts and Mocong parameters are not compatible; secondly, the painting on these platforms Most of the tools serve their own well-known products. For example, Meitu focuses on the application of AI in photo editing. Generally speaking, they tend to exert force in a certain direction.

Wujie is based on the community and has diverse directions. Its products "flow as freely as water" and flow to fields with commercial potential, such as architectural design, interior design, fashion design, comics, games and other fields. In each explosive vertical industry, Wujie will cooperate with one or two leading B-side customers to develop industry models. Industry models may be a battleground for AIGC strategists in the second half of the year. It is difficult for a single general model to become a unified solution for vertical industries.

All Weather Technology: Your B-end customers include real estate companies, cultural tourism groups, and consumer goods companies, with a wide range of industries. What is the logic behind selecting clients in these industries? Just make money?

Changchai: Yes, there are some activities. They are just to collect some excellent works and do not involve specific product levels. We basically don’t have much choice in this kind, as long as customers are willing to come. , we all welcome. Judging from the first half of the year, the needs of customers in most industries are mainly focused on marketing activities.

However, in the past two months, there have been more and more cooperation in MaaS. For example, in the indoor home decoration industry, we have model training cooperation with 3D Home and Oppein. In the second half of the year, Wujie will release models for industries such as architecture, interior, clothing, patterns, automobiles, and industry.

Task images generated by the unbounded AI character photo model

"The barrier of AI painting company is community product power"

All Weather Technology: Now when it comes to AI painting, everyone’s first reaction may be Midjourney. What do you think is Midjourney’s moat?

长铗：Midjourney’s moat has two aspects, a huge community and strong product power. Midjourney continues to iterate with the help of the Discord community. As an integrated voice and text chat software suitable for gamers, the social attributes of the Discord platform also allow Midjourney to capture more users' minds. Its products have strong individuality and have formed an aesthetic school. In contrast, applications in the Stable Diffuion open source ecosystem are difficult to form their own personality in products because of the "letting a hundred flowers bloom".

Although Wujie is based on the SD ecosystem, its future team and product construction will become more and more MJ-oriented. In terms of products, in the second half of this year we will successively release industry models such as interior design and architectural design, as well as design models focusing on national style, national fashion, and national comics, so that the products will be more in line with the aesthetics of Chinese users. In terms of embodying Chinese art, I believe Unbounded will be better than Midjourney.

All-Weather Technology: After models such as Disco diffusion and Stable diffusion were open sourced, many AI painting startups emerged in China. Some people commented that their models and products are seriously homogeneous. What do you think?

长铗： This problem does exist at present. The popularity of SD ecology some time ago was mainly due to the community driving force of the two-dimensional community to generate electricity for love. However, most of these models are fusion models and lack originality. Sex is known as the melting pot of all things, so overall, product homogeneity is relatively serious. The themes of the community model are relatively narrow, mostly common themes such as beauty, animation, illustrations, etc., which are still far away from relatively professional vertical needs. Painting models such as Stable Diffusion cannot be directly commercialized. Everyone uses its underlying technology, and competitiveness still depends on innovation at the vertical application level.

All-Weather Technology: What should be the barriers for AI painting companies?

Changchai: As far as Unbounded is concerned, there are two points: the first is the community, and the second is product competitiveness.

Like open communities such as blockchain, AIGC is actually community-driven logic. Community users are mainly divided into two categories, one is the model trainer (commonly known as the alchemist), and the other is the prompt engineer (commonly known as the magician). Users have very high autonomy and originality. If the model parameters they explore cannot be reused on other platforms, then its migration cost will inevitably be high. In addition to the painting model, Wujie is also training its own language model. Of course, it is a fine-tuned language model for painting applications. It will help users write prompt words, help alchemists label pictures, and convert natural language into labels that the SD painting model can understand. We will also make it open source for the community to use for free.

“The financing situation in the field of AI painting will improve in the second half of the year”

All Weather Technology: The field of AI painting has been very popular since the second half of last year, but not many companies have raised funds so far. What do you think is the reason?

Changchai: I personally feel that in the first half of this year, investors’ attention was mainly on large language models. In this technology-driven wave, investors still tend to invest in companies whose underlying logic is technology-driven. For projects that focus on the application layer, investors pay more attention to pragmatic questions such as "Who are your big customers? How do you make money? How are the financial data?" But at this stage, most AIGC application layer companies are still in the expansion stage, and the revenue data is definitely not so good. By the second half of this year, everyone’s situation should improve, and the financing situation will also improve.

All Weather Technology: How is your financing progress currently?

Changchai: We are quite Buddhist about this matter. I think financing is a natural thing, so we did not look for capital everywhere, and our main focus was still on products and operations. .

All Weather Technology: At what level do you think Unbounded’s product strength will reach, or what scale of users will it reach, that it’s time to proactively promote financing?

Changchai: In terms of financing, we actually have no phased goals. If capital comes to us and wants to invest in us, we welcome it at any time. If not, we will not force it. But we do have business goals, and the pressure is relatively high. This year we want to achieve 100 million yuan in revenue and 10 million users.

All Weather Technology: How much revenue can it achieve now?

Changchai: There is still a certain gap between the target and the pressure in the second half of the year is still relatively high, depending on the growth curve, but we still remain optimistic about the future.

All Weather Technology: Since the day AI painting was born, there have been copyright disputes. How do you avoid this problem?

Changchai: We have also specifically studied the issue of copyright identification. Last year, everyone said that AI was a stitching monster, a cutting monster, a pasting monster, a precision cutting monster, and so on. Such problems did exist in the early days. But with the development of AI, its artistic creativity is getting higher and higher. Now it is basically impossible for an AI work to resemble the work of a certain artist, because the current models are all fusion models, integrating multiple art schools. , artistic style, rather than learning one or two artists.

In addition, for painting, what is important is the originality of the content of the picture, not the tool. With the application of technologies such as controlnet, segment anything, and dragan, users have more and more control over AI-generated images. They can segment, drag, and distort images like PS. The information input by the user is no longer a single prompt. Words, as well as the careful matching of model parameters, and the application of external information such as depth, action postures, line drawings, outlines, etc., mean that users are becoming more and more original. In addition, I personally believe that with the development of AI, AI works will definitely be copyrighted in the future.

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