Entrepreneurs
2 Curated Dialogues
任永亮
Key Views & Dialogues
47. A Conversation with 测测’s 任永亮 About His 99-Point Ambition: Tools, AI, and the New Continent of Robotics
测测 combines RMB100M-plus revenue and 40M-50M users with RMB10M-scale AI revenue, funding a vertical model whose edge rests on a decade of conversation data, post-training, and rapid iteration rather than a proprietary foundation model. Its bigger bet is a self-built RMB10K-range family robot due before the end of next year, but unanimous internal opposition, unproven technical milestones, and uncertain willingness to pay make this a long-duration execution risk.
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- The opening introduction describes 测测 as a broad-based psychology platform with more than RMB100M in revenue and 40M-50M users; 任永亮 admits that without foundation models, he had almost lost his enthusiasm for the future—“Before that, it felt like I had become a civil servant: I could see exactly how it would end.” The host also says 测测 was already generating RMB10M-scale revenue from AI by the end of 2024, while its active users had doubled every year for the past 3 years and users born in the 2000s accounted for 50%.
- 任永亮 rates his commercial ambition at 99/100 (Musk at 100/100), and says that does not conflict with his understated appearance—“I try not to let it burn me.” On the fourth day of the 2023 Lunar New Year, he sent a letter to the entire company; on the seventh day, he called an all-hands meeting and scrapped the existing annual plan, redirecting resources toward foundation models. The host noted that roughly one-third of revenue that year went into foundation models; he replied, “About that. I can’t remember the exact figure.” He also said: “I’m conservative when it comes to products, but I’ve never been conservative about spending.”
- 测测’s AI strategy is vertical rather than foundational: 星源 is built on an open-source base, primarily 通义, with post-training and fine-tuning layered on top, while more than a decade of conversation data provides a “prepackaged-meal” context. He believes that “the more vertical we are, the greater our advantage if we don’t build a foundation model,” which is why he remains cautious about turning the product into a single DeepSeek-style chat window. Asked about the defensibility of something “anyone else could build,” he points to better algorithms, data, execution, and faster iteration: “There are no shortcuts.”
- The biggest strategic bet is a family companion robot opposed by the entire staff: 测测 will build both the hardware and the model, price the product in the RMB10K range, deliver the first generation “before the end of next year,” and position it as a “silicon-based beauty.” He insists on mobility rather than a desktop toy: “In the mobile internet era, we’re all the user’s servants… With a robot product, at minimum we should establish equality—the user can ignore me, but if I think it’s necessary, I can approach you first.”
- His methodology has flipped from “using four ounces to move a thousand pounds” to “using a thousand pounds to break four ounces”: when technology is showing promise but remains immature, it takes heavy investment to validate tiny, seemingly insignificant needs. He calls the robot his “last job before retirement,” with a time horizon of at least 10 years. He has also proposed a “reverse-emotion strategy”: Doubao-style people-pleasing is “the servility of mobile internet unchanged,” while education must run against dopamine. “If you can’t do that, then in practice I don’t think you have any value to humanity.”
- Looking back over 12 years, his biggest miss was failing to track the GPT trajectory while he was occupied with internal management in 2022: “By the time I found out, everyone already knew.” 测测 was already using BERT for online Q&A in 2018, and paid Q&A could answer in a single turn; he says that if he had known about GPT-2 then, “I should have built it a year earlier.” Given another chance, he would build ChatGPT or a general-purpose large language model because that better fits his “spiritual pursuit” or aesthetic.
- Asked whether AI will ultimately understand emotion better than people, he gives an unequivocal answer: “It will definitely be AI”—emotion is not that complex, belongs to the limbic system, and is essentially a problem of the ratios among “six hormones”; AI can turn emotion from a black box into a white box. AI still cannot replace human counselors in the short term. As AI advances, counselors may become more valuable and more free: “One day, all the fast food in the world will be free, but there will always be a moment when you want to eat a meal your mother once made.”
- His investment-style self-diagnosis is unsparing: “The kind of market you choose determines the kind of company you become”—mass-market psychology is a slow, long-duration service business, not a breakout category. The host recounted a metaphor about companies from the previous generation stranded on floating ice and searching for a new continent; 任永亮 picked it up and concluded: “That new continent is the era of robots.”
Vol. 177 From Tools and Communities to Emotional Foundation Models and Embodied Intelligence: Ren Yongliang on 测测 Through the 2011, 2016 and 2022 Technology Cycles
测测 uses a roughly 40M-user platform and consulting and user payments, profitable continuously since 2017, to fund its AI team and a pet-sized home companion robot. 任永亮 expects a sellable product in the first half of next year, but AI services lack economies of scale and their emotional-value model remains unresolved, while robot PMF and 100,000-to-1M-unit shipments are unproven.
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- 测测 is a profitable broad mental-wellness platform that has kept its head down: about 40M users, 75% women, typical users are urban women aged 20-40, profitable continuously since 2017, and using consulting and user payments to fund its AI team and robotics projects. Ren Yongliang’s thinking mirrors 梁文锋’s: “I lack top-tier fundraising ability… so we use business cash flow to support an algorithms team.” The company now has fewer than 300 employees, more than half of whom joined within the past year, and growth is accelerating.
- DeepSeek ended the AI war—the hardest judgment in the entire episode: “It squeezed out the last bit of room for my imagination.” (“把我最后一点想象力的空间都给我挤没了”) Before DeepSeek, every AI startup might still have retained the fantasy of “building China’s OpenAI”; now that fantasy is gone, and everyone has been forced to “put their egos aside and look at applications.” Embodied intelligence has become the new hot sector, intensifying competition for him. “I just didn’t expect the AI war to end so quickly. It would have been better if the competition had lasted a few more years.”
- The core new bet is a pet-sized home companion robot, with a sellable product—not a demo—expected in the first half of next year. The only successful consumer robotics category is the robot vacuum, which should have 100M-level users; Japan’s “Lavot” and China’s toy-like robots may each have shipped fewer than 50,000 units. His goal is to ship more than 100,000 and eventually over 1M units within several years and “create a category”—explicitly not a toy, humanoid robot or industrial manipulator. Multimodal interaction and mobility are the two non-negotiables.
- Li Xiang characterizes AI on the application side as a cost center: every inference burns tokens, and Ren Yongliang says, “Of course.” “The best business model for delivering emotional value… I don’t believe it’s selling tokens.” He admits he does not yet have the answer and is running several experiments. AI is inherently personalized, but “it cannot generate economies of scale; the cost of every service it provides is rigid.” Vertical players’ moat lies in scenarios, real-user feedback and a professional psychology-data team: “Building a simple demo is easy. The key is observing long-term results in real-world scenarios.”
- The macro backdrop is deflationary: “AI does not create demand; it destroys demand.” Unlike the Industrial Revolution, it reduces jobs without creating enough new ones, breaking the loop between specialization, income and consumption. “The chances that AI startups grow into midsize or large companies will also be limited.” Psychological and emotional needs, however, are rising gradually and benefiting from the lipstick effect—he cites Hong Kong-listed POP MART, Laopu Gold and Ne Zha. “Our platform is basically a massage.”
- Human counselors cannot be replaced “within 100 years.” As AI spreads and educates more users, demand for human counselors may instead rise, like organic vegetables. The moat is the dirty work associated with 朱啸虎: managing tens of thousands of counselors, resolving disputes, and building certification and pricing systems. Taobao and Baidu both tried entering the space, but “once they saw growth was too slow, they said, ‘Forget it, we’re not doing this.’”
- The tuition bill is worth recording: missing GPT-2, parting ways with a chief scientist after one year, spending tens of millions in 2023 on an AI team, buying GPUs and labeling data—all led to the conclusion that “the standard answer was DeepSeek” and everything else had been wasted effort. The fantasy of general-purpose foundation models lasted only 2-3 months: the funding and talent density requirements were extreme, “domestic giants may all struggle to close the gap with the US,” and chip compute was the bottleneck.