This summer vacation, AI study camps went fully viral.

A child under 10 years old stands on a roadshow stage, presenting his “swim bladder half-vortex flow technology”; beside him, several teammates wear name badges labeled CEO, CTO, and CMO. A few days later, the project ends, the funding won’t be disbursed, and each participant receives a graduation certificate.

In the past, parents sent kids to English camps, military camps, or outdoor camps. Now it’s popular to send them to be a “young Elon Musk.” “Be a product manager at 8, manage investments at 13,” and there are even programs that promise they can start an AI company in 6 days, charging 12,800 yuan; the more expensive entrepreneurship camps charge nearly 30k yuan per term.

Whether you can really learn to start a business in 6 days is unclear, but the business model canvas can definitely be memorized.

But in reality, the AI content in many courses isn’t priced nearly as high as advertised.

Some are just going to universities and tech companies, taking some photos, and coming back counts as “completing industry recognition”; others pay 15,000 yuan to join a “Large Model Hands-on Training Camp,” and in the end they learn to use AI to make PPTs and write copy. When the instructors aren’t enough, short-term training for a few days is enough to get them on the job—one practitioner even said outright that in the market, “more than 90% is just fooling people.”

Many study camps also aren’t really selling courses, but rather a kind of psychological comfort parents urgently need: “Other people’s 8-year-old kids are already raising funds; my kid at least can’t only play pretend🙄”

Whether the child actually learned AI is uncertain, but parents have already experienced—firsthand—what it means to be precisely harvested.