Raising 2 million in financing at the age of 8? AI is mass-producing child prodigies.

We Chinese have long cherished the admiration for child prodigies.

In the old days, a kid who could recite Tang poems at the age of 3 and perform mental abacus calculation at 5 would be praised as a genius by people from nearby villages.

However, after the emergence of AI, the evolution speed of child prodigies was suddenly accelerated to an absurdly fast level.

If Einstein were born today, he would probably only be considered a slow-learning underachiever. The current Internet is experiencing an unprecedented "prodigy inflation".

Shooting a film at 7, getting tens of millions of investment at 8, starting a business at 9, and becoming a boss at 13. Earning 80,000 yuan in 5 days, holding stock options, getting investments from industry tycoons, all kinds of absurd titles are flying everywhere.

While other third-grade kids are still crying and begging their dads to vote for Ultraman Zero.

These young kids in short videos have more than 4,000 hours of AI usage time, and making an exquisite PPT in 3 minutes is a common basic skill for all of them.

Just entering first grade, they can all teach you how to make a small game from scratch. Before they can even fully hold a mouse, they have already started designing products.

The terms they mention all the time are: the underlying logic of family education, financial analysis, basic programming.

Their video update frequency is even more stable than Shi Chao's, with a new update every four or five days. From talk podcasts to digital unboxing videos, they have complete sets of scenes, lighting and audio recording equipment.

Shi Chao is really fed up with this kind of life where you are outperformed by the old and outshone by the young.

It can be said that except that the person appearing on camera is a child, there is almost no difference between these accounts and mature self-media accounts. Many people say they see the shadow of young Tim.

But the above situations may still be explained by "extraordinary talent", while the following situation is too absurd to make sense.

Developing projects and getting millions of investment at 8, starting an AI business at 9, really makes Shi Chao completely confused.

What's more amazing is that logically, as the threshold gets higher and higher, the number of child prodigies on the market should become rarer and rarer.

But Shi Chao can brush across a new "prodigy" every few weeks. Could it be that this generation of kids have gene mutations and all are once-in-a-generation geniuses?

To figure it out, Shi Chao did some research. Finally he found that AI does not create geniuses, it only creates the illusion of geniuses.

In plain language, AI has become a low-cost cheating plug-in for many young kids to show off.

First of all, many seemingly amazing operations, such as product design and game development, are actually just copy and paste of prompts.

For example, this tutorial of making a small game in three minutes looks very impressive. In fact, you just open DeepSeek and say: Make an addition and subtraction game suitable for first-grade kids.

It is not the kid that is so amazing, it is DeepSeek that does all the work in the end.

This kind of situation is already considered good, at least the kid might really be tinkering by himself. But some accounts obviously have a huge team behind them.

Only 10 years old, but speaking in a mature and old-fashioned tone to the camera: "I used to understand a rule about electronic products..." At the same time, he skillfully takes out 6 6T hard drives that he "collected".

A few months ago, he was still posting videos sharing English learning experience. Suddenly one day, he turned into an AI expert, discussing with others which one is more important among AI, knowledge and thinking.

At an age when they can't even use Excel or Pr properly, they tell adults who are working overtime with these tools that these tools will be eliminated by AI.

These scripts are obviously written by adults, and the family has become a mini MCN. The child is responsible for appearing on camera and speaking, while adults are responsible for account operation and script writing.

Even, behind the child there may be not just parents, but professional MCN operations.

You may wonder, since the scripts are written by adults, why not let the parents appear on camera themselves?

Because the "child prodigy" is not only a personal setting, but also a scarce track with extremely high conversion rate and attraction rate.

Algorithms naturally prefer personal settings with a sense of contrast. "A kid talking about AI" itself has a super high completion rate.

Even if there is a mistake in the content, people who don't know much will only think it's amazing, and people who know the industry well will just take it as innocent words from a child.

AI manufacturers are also willing to create such child prodigies. By using the narrative that even kids can easily get started, they can subtly highlight that their products have zero threshold and are easy to use.

However, the above two situations are only a small part of these "prodigies", and more often they are just for satisfying parents' vanity.

But people who really want to make money from you will brag without any scruples.

Claims like self-learning all subjects with AI in 2 months, earning 70,000 yuan in the first month of starting a business, a 6-year-old girl running a company by herself, and so on.

When you are full of praise for these excellent kids, the video reaches the end and the real purpose is finally revealed:

"My daughter Yueyue is taking a certain teacher's AI training course recently. DM me if you need it."

At this moment you suddenly realize that their only purpose is selling courses!

Various AI youth training courses are continuously mass-producing child prodigies, marketing how AI allows kids to achieve super evolution, even get rich overnight.

In their words, all the subjects like Chinese, mathematics, English, physics, chemistry and biology are worthless in front of AI.

"Why should you let your kids take AI courses in the first batch?"

"In the short term, AI has deeply affected children's path to further education. In the long run, AI directly determines children's future employment competitiveness."

"Families that can't use AI are sliding towards a new type of poor class."

With a bunch of fancy original buzzwords, like primal force, aspiration force, computing power, agent, embodied intelligence and so on.

Who wouldn't be tempted, feeling that they are just a few thousand yuan away from being as successful as Musk.

So this summer vacation, AI research camps that cost thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan have completely replaced English and programming courses, becoming the new top trend in the education track.

As long as it is related to AI, the price of the course can be multiplied several times.

For example, many research and creation camps, the 6-day 5-night research course priced at 12,800 yuan is booked by parents without hesitation, and they even say it is good value for money after paying.

The most expensive one sells a 6-day course for 29,800 yuan, recruiting 150 students per session, which means a revenue of 4.47 million yuan.

Earning 4.47 million yuan in 6 days, Shi Chao wonders how long it will take these kids to earn 4.47 million yuan when they grow up.

Even remote online courses can be sold at high prices. Shi Chao consulted an AI course taught by a Tsinghua PhD, the price is about 12 classes: 3899 yuan per person for one-on-one teaching, 2999 yuan per person for two-on-one teaching.

You know, even Li Yizhou who sells courses only dares to price his courses at 199 yuan.

So what exactly in these courses is worth tens of thousands of yuan?

To put it simply, after checking around, Shi Chao finds nothing that is worth that price.

The most shoddy ones are some research camps held by big tech companies