Shixiang’s CEO, Guangmi, and investor Cao Xi, the “second most formidable” in China

I would like to call them Sequoia’s twin stars. Shixiang 2026 outlook:
① Model paradigm / technical inflection point
A new paradigm signal for Continual Learning emerges (industry consensus: 1–2 routes)
The World Model approach converges, entering the “GPT-2 moment”
AI scientists solve the first major scientific breakthrough
China-based companies continuously outtake the open-source SOTA (the US can’t break through DeepSeek; Qwen/DeepSeek dominate the charts)
② Products / entry points
ChatGPT DAU doubles to 800–1 billion, and web traffic reaches half of Google’s
ChatGPT “App-store moment,” the first native $100M ARR application
Multimodal ushers in the “AI Coding moment,” producing Pokémon GO–style phenomenon-level products
Personalized / proactive agents create a sticky user retention moat
The Agentic Web “3Q battle,” with Apple entering to set the protocol
③ Business / capital
OpenAI’s narrative reverses in the second half of the year; valuation breaks a trillion
A huge enterprise AI year: Anthropic ARR doubles and an $20B
AI valuation consensus forms; agent value can be quantified
A big year for US-listed AI IPOs—after emotional highs, it may cool off
④ Compute / hardware infrastructure
Nvidia aggressively lights up optical interconnects; a CPO M&A wave follows
A storage revolution (eSSD / HBF): storage moves from an external device to the core of compute
Inference compute explodes; token consumption increases by at least 10x
⑤ AI in the physical world
xAI integrates into Tesla, linking digital + the physical-world AGI
Google breaks 5 trillion; M7 splits (MSFT/AWS/Meta fall behind)
The first year of scalable monetization for autonomous driving (Robotaxi ~300k units, FSD doubles)
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