陶芳波

陶芳波 is betting not on a better AI assistant, but on a unique, trainable and distributable “identity foundation model” for every person. Jarvis-style him and Her-style her are external roles; Second Me aims to internalize memory, preferences, emotions and values as parameters, allowing AI to autonomously connect with services, people and other Agents as “me.” The platform-level vision is a structurally similar AI replica of human society, but with more efficient connection, negotiation and decision-making.

Mindverse’s technical dividing line is its refusal to fake personalization with one foundation model plus different RAG knowledge bases. 陶芳波 believes thinking happens in model parameters: if everyone shares the same model, “at bottom, there is no difference between me and you.” The team first rewrites raw data into first-person, subjective memories organized around people and issues, then fine-tunes an AI-native memory. At this stage, about 100 memories, equivalent to roughly 20 hours of data, are enough to get started; 7B is considered a suitable range, and daily training may cost less than $1.

Open source is the most important trust strategy for this kind of sensitive infrastructure. Second Me supports local training and deployment, so personal data need not go to the cloud, while the model can still connect to the internet. The project reached 10K GitHub Stars in about three weeks and roughly 12K by the time of the episode; more than 10 users even spent tens of thousands of yuan on computers to train themselves. The community defines it as a “middle layer for digital identity,” or even “the interface between people and the AI era,” showing that demand is driven not only by functional efficiency but also by the powerful psychological desire to preserve oneself.

The most immediately deployable products are not fully autonomous task execution, but expression, judgment and information compression. Me.bot’s Talks can generate 1—3-minute audio messages from personal memories for specific audiences, while allowing listeners to ask questions in real time. With only about 30 seconds spent writing a prompt and roughly two minutes of waiting, 陶芳波 completed a startup talk that would normally require 1—2 hours of preparation. “Resonance” lets two Second Me models match and break the ice in about 5—10 seconds after phones touch, or helps a record that is neither fully public nor fully private find genuinely relevant respondents.

The distribution strategy deliberately avoids the cold start of a two-sided network: people who receive Talks do not need to have their own Second Me first. Content can enter existing recruiting and social scenarios through H5 pages; over the longer term, a Second Me Server similar to MCP could provide personalized scoring, filtering and judgment to websites and services. 陶芳波 acknowledges that China’s internet is currently “closed off into islands,” with limited API access, but believes universal identity will eventually clash with closed data loops. Whoever becomes the neutral identity layer trusted by users could occupy the position of new infrastructure.

The near-term monetization answer is to charge individual users who rely heavily on identity services; the longer-term vision is to charge service providers that call on identity. If users control their identity models, e-commerce, content platforms and advertising systems should theoretically pay identity owners for more accurate preference and decision data, with Mindverse taking a service fee. That would turn individuals from “platform products” into owners of their identity assets. 陶芳波 explicitly calls this “a beautiful idea” and says he is unsure it can be realized; the commercial loop remains unproven.

The main unresolved issues are data collection, real-time guardrails, platform access and user habits. WeChat, iPhone and other incumbents naturally possess more data, and large companies can enter the field; the startup window lies in having a “new species” first serve a small group of committed believers and then cross the chasm, rather than competing on installed distribution. 陶芳波’s next milestone is to make the identity-bridge model a de facto standard and improve “symbiosis” and “connection” enough to drive 10x or 100x growth—still a non-consensus, long-duration bet with an unproven commercial loop.