The Year of the Snake: A Decade of Abundant Opportunities Ahead

Introduction

Hello everyone, I’m Wang Yuquan, and this is Wang Yuquan’s News Review. As we step into the New Year, I’d like to extend my best wishes to all of you: Happy New Year, may all your wishes come true, and may your families be happy and healthy!

For those who have been following us and are familiar with our work, you know that I have long been engaged in the observation and analysis of cutting-edge technologies and the prediction of future trends. At a time when many people are feeling a bit lost, I want to share some good news and our judgment for 2025: 2025 will be the year with the most and greatest opportunities in the past decade and the next decade.

Looking Back at the Past

The rapid development of China’s economy in the past was due to the in-depth implementation of reform and opening up and the market economy. Over these forty years, countless opportunities have emerged, creating numerous successful enterprises and individuals. However, as various dividends gradually fade and the economic system becomes more完善 (perfect), the once easily accessible opportunities in China have become hard to reach, and the world seems to have entered an era of stock market competition.

But new opportunities are on the horizon, and the key is whether you can anticipate their arrival and know where they will emerge. The answer lies in technology. Technology is the driving force behind social progress, continuously creating new opportunities. The higher the level of technology and the stronger its versatility, the more opportunities it brings.

Most Chinese entrepreneurs have witnessed the huge changes brought about by the Internet, which not only completely changed our way of life but also gave rise to countless business opportunities. Subsequently, the rise of wireless Internet pushed this wave to new heights, with an impact range and depth that exceeded our imagination. The Internet and wireless Internet are also known as general-purpose technologies because they are not limited to a specific field but can spill over into various industries, driving the progress of the entire society.

The Current Technological Revolution: Artificial Intelligence

Today, humanity stands at the threshold of a more far-reaching technological revolution—the artificial intelligence revolution. This revolution, which began with generative artificial intelligence initiated by OpenAI and has become increasingly mature with AI Agent (intelligent agent) technology, has reached an unprecedented level of versatility and applicability across various industries. It is not only about text generation, image generation, and video generation but also includes intelligent voice interaction, deep reasoning analysis, and more. From healthcare to education, scientific research, manufacturing, and marketing, artificial intelligence is permeating every corner of society, bringing unprecedented changes and opportunities to all industries.

For example, Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold has solved the protein folding problem that has plagued the biological community for 50 years. The latest version, AlphaFold3, can now predict almost all protein molecules. Another example is JPMorgan Chase’s development of the COIN (Contract Intelligence) system, which automatically annotates potential legal loopholes in contracts by comparing historical litigation data, enabling legal teams to quickly identify and avoid risks in advance. Of course, at the corporate level, it can also significantly improve overall business efficiency. Huang Renxun recently mentioned that AI agents will become the new digital workforce. In the future, there will be more and more AI agents in your company, responsible for completing repetitive tasks and even complex data analysis work.

Why 2025 is the Year of Abundant Opportunities

Our judgment that 2025 will be the year with the most opportunities is based on the underlying laws of technological innovation driving technological revolutions. In any technological revolution, the greatest opportunities often do not appear at the starting point of the revolution but in the middle stage when the revolution transitions from the introduction phase to the expansion phase. In the introduction phase, the technological revolution is only testing one or two application possibilities, and the opportunities are relatively few. But as the technological revolution deepens, new business models begin to mature and spread rapidly across various industries, and this is when the opportunities are the most abundant. However, after entering the expansion phase in depth, opportunities will gradually decrease.

For example, the development and production of Ford’s Model T can be considered the introduction phase of the automotive industry, but when Ford cars were successfully applied to various industries, it entered the expansion phase of the automotive and related industries. In this transitional stage, when the technological revolution is rapidly spreading, those with keen insight and action ability can often discover golden opportunities.

At the Frontiers Conference 2024, we mentioned a child named Jim Casey, who dropped out of school at the age of 11. He had little education and no technical skills. However, he had long been engaged in delivery services and keenly observed the huge changes that the popularization of automobiles brought to society. He then founded a courier company, pioneering the use of automobiles for package delivery, and gradually developed it into today’s global courier empire, UPS (United Parcel Service).

Now, based on the general laws of technological change in society and our observations of the current state of artificial intelligence, we can clearly judge that 2025 will be the year when the artificial intelligence revolution transitions from the introduction phase to the expansion phase and is widely used in various industries. Therefore, there will undoubtedly be the most opportunities.

Specifically, there are three supporting pieces of evidence:

First, the core technologies of artificial intelligence and their supporting technologies have gradually matured. We have always emphasized that the real outbreak of a technology depends not only on whether its core technology is powerful but also on whether its supporting technologies are complete. Now, the technology of artificial intelligence large models has basically matured, and its related supporting technologies, such as reasoning ability, memory, the ability to call other applications, and the collaboration ability between AI agents, are also becoming more and more perfect. This marks that the artificial intelligence revolution is rapidly spreading from the introduction phase to the expansion phase, and various industries are actively exploring the application scenarios of artificial intelligence.

Second, the focus of artificial intelligence research and development is shifting from performance improvement to solving practical application problems, which is also a standard characteristic of the transition from the introduction phase to the expansion phase of artificial intelligence. In basic research, Huang Renxun said that the scaling law has not failed, and great miracles can still be achieved with great efforts. The performance of artificial intelligence will continue to improve. However, the outbreak of technological applications does not need to wait until the performance is perfect. The key is whether the market can accept it. Therefore, there is a lot of research and development in more application-oriented fields, continuing to make breakthroughs, such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), terminal intelligence, visual intelligence, and multimodal intelligence.

In addition, we have already seen the rudiments of many future applications of artificial intelligence. We have always emphasized that the artificial intelligence revolution will be divided into four stages: performance optimization, energy saving and efficiency improvement, simple services, and complex services. Now, enterprises focusing on performance optimization have gradually been eliminated, and enterprises focusing on energy saving and efficiency improvement will generally achieve revenue and profits in 2025. More importantly, the rudiments of simple and complex service applications have begun to appear and will gradually mature in 2025.

How to Seize the Opportunities

We have also provided a relatively clear timetable:

In 2025 and 2026, new giant enterprises will emerge, and their business models will gradually take shape.

From 2027 to 2029, these enterprises will establish their positions in the industry and become unshakable.

From 2030 to 2034, they will not only have a solid position in the industry but also realize their capital value, gain widespread recognition from the public, and after successful listing, the capital market will give them full recognition, and their market value will continue to expand, eventually becoming the new masters.

Based on this forecast, we hope you can make your own plans and do your best to obtain the dividends of this era.

But we must emphasize that in the expansion phase, the core is no longer the technology itself, but the application of technology. The essence of successful operation is no longer a technological advantage but a change and upgrade in thinking. Because new technologies will inevitably bring new businesses and new models, and new models are the key to success. Only if your thinking keeps pace with the technology can you truly understand how to make full use of artificial intelligence to design completely different businesses.

Just like when Jim Casey founded UPS, he didn’t need to understand the technical principles of automobiles, but he had to know how to use automobiles to maximize their value. So, we often say that technology is a tank, and the key is to launch a blitzkrieg. If you can launch a blitzkrieg, you can enter the market now.

Conclusion

2025 is the year with the most opportunities in the next decade, but there is still a long way to go in the future. So, don’t lie down and give up. You must start preparing and taking action as soon as possible!