You still have to believe in Fu Sheng's "product luck".

The hottest topic in the tech circle recently is none other than the "Lobster".

The open - source AI agent OpenClaw, with a logo resembling a lobster, has swept through the entire internet like a whirlwind, starting from the geek community. There were long queues outside the Tencent building, with nearly a thousand developers bringing their computers to install it on - site. Alibaba and Meituan launched services overnight, and mobile phone manufacturers rushed to make native integrations. Overnight, everyone was talking about "raising lobsters". It seemed that missing this "lobster" meant missing out on the next big thing in the internet.

Naturally, along with the popularity comes controversy. Many people believe that this is just another wave of concept hype, over - hyped, and even suspected of creating anxiety. It's not uncommon to hear remarks like "the weirder the name, the faster the newcomers get exploited".

However, in our view, we should pay sufficient attention to this "Lobster Fever". There are many reasons, and one rather mysterious one is that we've seen Fu Sheng frequently popularizing the idea of "raising lobsters" recently. Behind this veteran of the internet industry, his amazing "product luck" seems to be at work again.

Fu Sheng's "Product Luck" Is More Than Just a Mystery

In the Chinese internet circle, Fu Sheng is a unique figure. His career is a history of the evolution of Chinese internet products.

In his early days at Kingsoft, he led a team to develop security software, carving out a path in the gap between giants. Later at 360, he witnessed the "3Q War" that changed the landscape of the Chinese internet. Then, he took charge of Cheetah Mobile and boldly ventured overseas during the mobile internet wave, establishing a foothold in the unfamiliar overseas market.

What truly adds a legendary touch to Fu Sheng's "product luck" is an angel investment he made. He invested in a short - video product called Musical.ly, which was later acquired by ByteDance and became the predecessor of the well - known TikTok today. The ability to foresee the future of a product at its budding stage can't be simply explained by "luck".

Fu Sheng has his own methodology: "Goal - Path - Resources". He believes that one should first focus on the goal. If the goal is achievable, the lack of ability can be compensated for, rather than deciding what to do based on existing resources. This "beginning with the end in mind" insight allows him to often find seeds that could grow into towering trees in niche markets that are not valued by giants.

In 2016, when the mobile internet was at its peak, Fu Sheng plunged into the field of AI robots. Many people didn't understand at that time, but his judgment was that the era of monopoly by mobile internet giants had arrived, and a new track had to be found. Since robots are essentially "tools", this aligns with Cheetah's ability in tool - making.

As we all know, robots didn't become the next big thing. It wasn't the wrong direction; it was just that the "brain" (large - scale model) was lacking at that time. The "body" of the robot was well - developed, but the "brain" didn't keep up. However, this experience was not in vain. The understanding of hardware, perception, and interaction accumulated over the years has now become an insight into the new wave with the maturity of large - scale models.

From PC tools to mobile overseas expansion, from content investment to AI agents, you'll find that he doesn't focus on what's popular at the moment, but on the underlying logic of tool evolution, which is "what can make devices more useful". His enthusiasm for the "Lobster" this time is precisely because OpenClaw has transformed AI from a "talking advisor" into a "hands - on helper", completely redefining the concept of tools.

So, when a person like him, even while at home with a broken bone, still chats with the "Lobster" until three or four in the morning every day, consuming 100 million tokens per day and spending 30,000 yuan in a month, and excitedly says that "this is a major opportunity that hasn't appeared in the past decade", perhaps we shouldn't regard it as a veteran of the internet industry losing his mind in play, but rather as a signal.

The Disruptiveness of the "Lobster" Is Just Beginning

Many people misunderstand the "Lobster" as a smarter AI assistant, which greatly underestimates its power. The real disruption lies in its completion of the full closed - loop of "thinking - planning - executing - feedback".

In the past, when we used AI, we would ask it "how to write a market analysis report", and it would give us an outline, and we had to do the rest ourselves. But with the "Lobster", you just need to say "help me analyze the market data of the last quarter, write a report, and send the charts to my email", and it can open documents, retrieve data, generate charts, and send emails on its own. It is no longer just a "brain" but has grown "hands and feet".

This is the reason why all major tech companies dare not be negligent and even lose sleep over it. Their anxiety mainly stems from two aspects:

First, this is the "traffic source" and "revenue growth" for existing businesses. If you don't get involved, you'll be left behind.

For giants like Alibaba and Tencent, AI agents are not new toys but super tools to activate and integrate their own ecosystems. Look at Alibaba's Qianwen App, which is connected to Taobao, Alipay, and Gaode. Users can book flights, take taxis, and make payments with just one sentence, achieving an "end - to - end" closed - loop. What does this mean? It means that AI has become a new traffic distribution center. Whoever can combine AI with their ecosystem well can keep users within their own system.

For cloud service providers, the "Lobster" is an insatiable consumer of computing power. Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud launched "one - click deployment" packages overnight, which is essentially a race to seize the "water, electricity, and coal" of the AI agent era. If you don't do it, your cloud resources will be consumed by other companies' "Lobsters".

Second, the prototype of the "super - entry" has emerged, which is a dimensionality - reduction strike on the existing internet product forms.

Fu Sheng relayed a judgment from the founder of OpenClaw: 80% of apps will disappear in the future. This may sound like a wild claim, but the logic is solid: in the past, people had to adapt to tools, filling their phones with apps and learning how to use them; in the future, tools will adapt to people. You only need an AI assistant, and it will help you call various services. There will be no more concepts of "taxi - hailing apps" or "shopping apps"; there will only be an AI OS that can handle everything for you.

It will become the operating system of the AI era, posing a subversive threat to all existing internet products. If you don't develop your own AI agent, your services will sink to the bottom and become an unnamed tool called by others' AI assistants.

So, as the saying goes, if you don't get in the game, you'll be out.

The "Lobster" Is Not the Source of Anxiety; Stagnant Knowledge Structure Is

Facing the huge wave stirred up by the "Lobster", many people feel anxious, worried about being left behind by the times. But upon closer examination, the "Lobster" itself is not the source of anxiety. It's just a mirror that reflects the solidification and stagnation of many people's knowledge structures.

Why do people have such different reactions when facing the "Lobster"? Fu Sheng observed a phenomenon: those who ask basic questions in the user group never think that they can get good answers by directly asking AI. This is a mental inertia. They are still following the old path of "asking people or groups when having problems" instead of establishing the new logic of "asking AI for everything".

A more vivid contrast comes from an AI hacking programming competition. A 14 - year - old boy participated in the competition. His strategy was to let AI first determine which questions it could handle, then he opened 14 virtual machines and let AI answer the questions on its own, while he focused on the last major question. What about adults? They checked the code written by AI for each question, fearing mistakes. The result was predictable.

Fu Sheng sighed with emotion: "Adults treat AI as a question - answering machine, while young people treat it as a life operating system." That 14 - year - old boy is not burdened by past experience systems. For him, the capabilities of AI are a "bonus" and a bottom - layer logic that can be fully trusted and built upon. On the contrary, adults, because of having too much "experience" from the old era, have become the ceiling that limits the capabilities of AI.

"Don't limit large - scale models with human workflows, or you'll become their ceiling." This statement is eye - opening. Many people's anxiety is not because AI is too powerful, but because they learn too slowly and can't change their thinking. When we still use the thinking of the industrial era to understand products in the information era and try to fit AI into our familiar old frameworks, we will naturally encounter obstacles everywhere and become more and more anxious.

The real crisis is never the emergence of new tools, but our loss of the willingness and ability to learn new tools and adapt to new paradigms. When our knowledge structure stagnates and can't accommodate this rapidly changing world, any small change will seem like a huge wave that swallows everything in our eyes.

After all, the so - called "product luck" is just the sensitivity to change of a person who has been making tools for twenty years. Fu Sheng's excitement about the "Lobster" this time is not a prophet proclaiming a new trend. It's more like the instinctive reaction of an old craftsman when seeing a new tool, wanting to try it out and see what it can achieve.

That's enough.

As for how far this "Lobster" can go and whether it will really "eat" 80% of apps, time will tell. We don't need to rush to take sides or feel anxious. What's meant to happen will happen, and what's coming will come.

*This article is written based on public information and is only for information exchange purposes. It does not constitute any investment advice.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Jinduan" (ID: jinduan006). The author is Xuanyue, and it is published by 36Kr with authorization.