Dialogue with Chang Jia, Founder of Unbounded AI: The entrepreneurial opportunity of AI lies in the application layer

Author: Yu HuiruEditor: Liu Yu

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

The lower technical threshold has spawned a large number of AI painting startups, which also means fierce competition. For this, Unbounded AI in it has a personal experience.

At present, the number of unbounded AI users is less than 3 million, which is still far from the annual goal of 10 million. Chang Jia, the founder of Unbounded AI, said bluntly that user growth has entered a climbing period and will continue to work hard in the second half of the year. The weak growth of unbounded AI is a microcosm of the industry.

As an emerging field, the AI painting industry is changing rapidly. At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference a week ago, a new member of the Tongyi series of large models under Alibaba Cloud, Tongyi Wanxiang, was positioned as a large model for AI painting creation. In addition to Ali, the large models launched by companies such as Baidu, Xunfei, and Shangtang all have multi-modal functions such as Vincent diagrams.

This means that the infrastructure in the field of AI painting is becoming more and more popular. In fact, after the Stable Diffusion model was open-sourced, the threshold for Wen Shengtu business has been lowered a lot, and a large number of AI painting startups have been born in China. Unbounded AI is a start-up company that has grown up in this wave. It started from the "community as a service" model and iteratively optimized step by step in community operations.

Competition is becoming more and more fierce. At the end of March this year, as Midjourney, the most popular AI painting company in the industry, released the V5 version, iterated the generation effect of realistic images to "photographic level". The field of AI painting sounds the battle for survival.

The prospect of AI painting is compelling. According to Guotai Junan Research Report, by 2025, the penetration rate of AI painting in the field of image content generation will reach 30%, and the market size will exceed 200 billion yuan.

Temptation and challenge go hand in hand, and only the able one prevails. As a sci-fi writer who has won China’s sci-fi “Galaxy Award” for three consecutive times, Changjia’s real name is Liu Zhipeng. How will he lead Unbounded AI out of the encirclement? His answer is: "In the field of AI generation, more opportunities for domestic startups will appear at the application layer."

The following is the content of the dialogue between All-Weather Technology and Changjia, compiled by All-Weather Technology:

"The application of AI painting is still concentrated in the field of marketing"

**24/7 Technology: How many users do you currently have? **

**Changjia:**Our user base is now close to 3 million. We didn't make small programs, mainly APP users, supplemented by website users. Originally, our goal this year was to reach 10 million users, but these few months have entered a climbing period. The growth of user data is not as fast as when AIGC first became popular. There is still a distance from the goal of 10 million. We will continue to work hard in the second half of the year. .

**All-weather technology: How many paying users can account for? **

**Long clip: **C-side is 20%. We have 15 free drawing quotas for each user every day. Many users come here for the daily free quota, and we welcome it. For the C-end, we hope to establish unbounded industry influence. Revenue mainly depends on To B.

**All-Weather Technology: In the first half of this year, many powerful manufacturers entered the field of AI generation. What kind of pressure did it bring to you? **

**Changjia:**We didn’t regard it as pressure. Everyone’s playing style is different, and their positioning is also different. Dachang’s AI painting tools generally have a self-contained positioning, and have not opened up with the open community represented by SD (Stable Diffusion). The prompt times and Mo Cong parameters are not compatible; second, the painting of these platforms Most of the tools serve their well-known products. For example, Meitu focuses on the application of AI in image editing. Generally speaking, they are more inclined to exert force in a certain direction.

Unbounded is based on the community, with multiple directions, and its products "flow freely like water", flowing to fields with commercial potential, such as architectural design, interior design, fashion design, comics, games and other fields. In each explosive vertical industry, Wujie will cooperate with one or two leading B-end customers to develop industry models. The industry model may be the battleground of AIGC in the second half of the year. A single general model is difficult to become a unified solution for vertical industries.

**All-weather technology: Your B-end customers include real estate companies, cultural tourism groups, and consumer goods companies, covering a wide range of industries. What is the logic of selecting customers in these industries? Just make money? **

Changjia: Yes, there are some activities in nature, they are just to collect some excellent works, not related to the specific product level, we basically have no choice in this kind, as long as customers are willing to come, we welcome them. From the perspective of the first half of the year, the needs of most industry customers mainly focus on marketing activities.

However, in the past two months, there have been more and more cooperations in MaaS. For example, in the interior decoration industry, we have model training cooperation with Sanweijia and OPPEIN. In the second half of the year, Wujie will release industry models such as architecture, interior, clothing, patterns, automobiles, and industry.

*** Task images generated by the unbounded AI character portrait model ***

"The barrier of an AI painting company is community + product power"

**All-weather technology: Now that AI painting is mentioned, everyone’s first reaction may be Midjourney. What do you think is the moat of Midjourney? **

**Changjia:**Midjourney's moat has two aspects, a huge community and strong product power. Midjourney continues to iterate with the help of the Discord community. As an integrated voice and text chat software suitable for gamers, the social attributes of the Discord platform also allow Midjourney to seize more users' minds. Its products have a strong personality and have formed an aesthetic genre. In contrast, applications in the Stable Diffuion open source ecosystem are difficult to form their own personality on the product because of the 'hundred flowers blooming'.

Although Wujie is based on the SD ecology, the future team and product construction will become more and more MJ-oriented. In terms of products, in the second half of this year, we will successively release industry models such as interior design and architectural design, as well as design models focusing on national style, national trend, and national comics, so that the products can better meet the aesthetics of Chinese users. In terms of embodying Chinese art, I believe Unbounded will be better than Midjourney.

**All-weather technology: After models such as Disco diffusion and Stable diffusion were open sourced, many AI painting start-ups have sprung up in China. Some people commented that their models and products are seriously homogeneous. What do you think? **

Changjia: This problem does exist at present. The popularity of the SD ecology some time ago is mainly due to the community driving force of the two-dimensional community for love power generation. However, most of these models are fusion models, lacking originality, and are known as the melting pot of all things. , so on the whole, product homogeneity is serious. The themes of the community models are relatively narrow, mostly common themes such as beauties, animation, illustrations, etc., which are far from relatively professional vertical needs. These painting models of Stable Diffusion cannot be used directly for commercial use. Everyone uses its underlying technology, and competitiveness still depends on innovation at the vertical application level.

**All-weather technology: What should be the barriers for AI painting companies? **

Changjia: As far as Unbounded is concerned, there are two points: the first is the community, and the second is product competitiveness.

Like open communities such as blockchain, AIGC is actually a community-driven logic. Community users are mainly divided into two categories, one is model trainers (commonly known as alchemists), and the other is prompt subword engineers (commonly known as magicians). The autonomy and originality of users are very high. If the model parameters they explored cannot be reused on other platforms, then its migration cost will inevitably be high. In addition to the painting model, Wujie is also training its own language model, of course, a fine-tuned painting application language model, which will help users write prompt words, help alchemists label pictures, and convert natural language into labels that SD painting models can understand Chinese language, we will open source it and let the community use it for free.

"The financing situation in the field of AI painting will improve in the second half of the year"

**All-weather Technology: The field of AI painting has been very popular since the second half of last year, but there are not many companies that have raised funds so far. What do you think is the reason? **

**Chang Jia:**I personally feel that in the first half of this year, investors' attention was mainly on the big language model. In this technology-driven wave, investors still tend to invest in companies whose underlying logic is technology-driven. For projects that are partial to the application layer, investors pay more attention to practical questions such as "Which big customers do you have? How do you make money? How about financial data?" But at this stage, most AIGC application layer companies are still in the expansion period, and the revenue data is definitely not so good. By the second half of this year, everyone's situation should improve, and the financing situation will also improve.

**All-Weather Technology: How is your financing going now? **

Chang Jia: We are more Buddhist about this matter. I think financing is a natural thing, so we didn't go around looking for capital, and mainly focused on products and operations.

**All-Weather Technology: At what level do you think Unbounded’s product power has reached, or when its users have reached a scale, it is time to actively promote financing? **

Chang Jia: In terms of financing, we actually have no staged goals. If capital comes up and wants to invest in us, we welcome it at any time, and we don’t force it if we don’t have it. But we have business goals, and the pressure is still relatively high. This year we want to achieve 100 million yuan in revenue and 10 million users.

**All-weather technology: How much can the current revenue reach? **

Changjia: There is still a certain distance from the goal. The pressure in the second half of the year is still relatively high, depending on the growth curve, but we are still optimistic about the future.

**All-weather technology: From the day AI painting was born, there have been copyright disputes. How do you avoid this problem? **

**Changjia:**We have also specifically studied the issue of copyright identification. Last year, everyone said that AI was stitching monsters, splicing monsters, pasting monsters, fine cutting monsters, etc. Such problems did exist in the early days. But with the development of AI, its artistic creativity is getting higher and higher. Now there is basically no possibility that an AI work is like a certain artist's work, because the current models are all fusion models, which integrate multiple art genres. , artistic style, rather than learning one or two artists.

In addition, for painting, it is the originality of the picture content, not the tool, that is important. With the application of controlnet, segment anything, dragan and other technologies, users have more and more control over the pictures generated by AI. They can segment, drag and distort the pictures like PS, and the information input by users is no longer a single prompt. Words, as well as the careful collocation of model parameters, and the application of external information such as depth, action posture, line draft, outline, etc., which means that the user's originality is getting higher and higher. In addition, I personally think that with the development of AI, AI works will definitely have copyright in the future.