Die ehemaligen Kollegen, die von KI ersetzt wurden, verdienen inzwischen mit KI eine Million Euro pro Jahr.
36Kr "Career Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
Overnight, Manus, the world's first general-purpose AI agent, went viral, triggering a new wave of anxiety about the layoff crisis among office workers.
The year 2025 is regarded by the industry as the "Year of AI Application Explosion". On the homepage of McKinsey's official website, a report titled "Generative AI in China: $2 Trillion in Economic Value" points out that approximately 29 million business analysts, 22 million IT and software engineers, and 7 million creative and artistic practitioners are deeply affected by AI.
However, in this upheaval, we have also found some people who have turned the tables from the layoff crisis by leveraging AI. Some of them have "reset" their industries, and some have even achieved an annual income of one million yuan.
AI digital artist "Potato Man": Lay off himself and embrace digital art ╱ 01
AI application developer: When metaphysics meets large models ╱ 02
AI IP manager: Find AI stylization in the metaverse trend ╱ 03
AI + Education: A comeback after losing 6 million yuan in an online school ╱ 04
AI digital artist "Potato Man": Lay off himself and embrace digital art
Lin Chen, 33 years old, former creative director of an advertising company
The year 2023 was almost a "nightmare" for all creative designers.
With the advent of AI text-to-image generation, the art creation industry was the first to be impacted. Abroad, a survey by SoA of 12,500 practitioners showed that 25% of illustrators lost their jobs due to AI. Domestic tech giants also laid off design positions.
After seven years in the advertising industry, Lin Chen became the creative group director of an advertising company. However, he had long felt the chill in the industry, and the emergence of AI made it even worse. It seemed that no matter how he changed, he couldn't keep up with the market changes.
To cope with the uncertainty, Lin Chen started to use Midjourney (an AI text-to-image tool). Different from ordinary beginners, Lin Chen was deeply attracted by the powerful capabilities of AI. "During that time, I kept reflecting on whether generative AI also means that creativity can break free from the constraints of the production process," Lin Chen recalled.
Lin Chen indulged in expressing his creativity on Midjourney and updated his works on Xiaohongshu. He increasingly realized that the arrival of the AI era was not an end but a new beginning.
To his great surprise, after updating his Xiaohongshu account for some time, his works "Nike Temple House" and McDonald's "Heirloom" series unexpectedly went viral and were even widely shared by overseas users.
Lin Chen keenly sensed that brand clients were also starting to pay attention to the commercial value of generative AI creation. So, he embarked on the entrepreneurial journey as an AI digital artist with his only "employee" - AI.
● @Potato Man Tudou_man Xiaohongshu account
Entrepreneurship always means facing more unknown pressures and taking on more responsibilities and risks. The uncertainty of generative AI adds more elements of crisis to an already unstable entrepreneurial journey.
The generation logic of AI is probabilistic and cannot be precisely controlled like manual design. Therefore, he often spends a lot of time learning new creative tools and the expression techniques of AI tools. Through iterative generation results, he constantly adjusts keywords, parameters, and image content, and combines post-processing to create.
Lin Chen calls this repeated debugging process "black-box testing": During the black-box testing period, sometimes a demo has to be tried hundreds of times. "It takes about 30 minutes for the computer to generate a 15-second video, which is very time-consuming," Lin Chen said.
To create satisfactory AI artworks, one needs to constantly express ideas and "talk" to the AI tool. In this process, Lin Chen has also trained his own "digital avatar". "Although it can think like me, in terms of creativity, humans still have an irreplaceable value. AI can only reach your level, but humans can continuously surpass themselves," Lin Chen said.
Now, the price of a commercial cooperation for Lin Chen's account @Tudou_man reaches 300,000 - 500,000 yuan, and the cooperating brands are all top-tier. Against the backdrop of the overall downturn in the advertising industry, this achievement is particularly remarkable. In addition to establishing cooperation with dozens of well-known brands, he also collaborated with Kuaishou and Keling AI this year to create a highly creative Year of the Snake image.
After the commercialization of the IP was successful, he also launched the digital art exhibition IP "Regeneration Art Museum" to continuously explore the infinite possibilities of AIGC art. "When a new medium emerges, it will redefine the relationship between people and content, and between brands and audiences. I hope to stand at this turning point and explore its boundaries," Lin Chen told "Career Bonus".
"Maybe it was just luck that I was initially noticed; but what's rarer than luck is the courage to make a choice."
● Left: Digital art exhibition "Regeneration Art Museum"; Right: Concept draft of the spiritual snake in cooperation with Kuaishou (Provided by the interviewee)
● Lin Chen (Provided by the interviewee)
AI application developer: When metaphysics meets large models
Levy, 32 years old, former product manager at ByteDance
He majored in English in undergraduate, minored in statistics, and got a master's degree in finance. After graduation, he started a business in the field of artificial intelligence law. Behind these seemingly illogical experiences is Levy's "mutual attraction" with artificial intelligence.
Levy has always been very interested in artificial intelligence. In 2016, when the news that AlphaGo defeated the Go champion Lee Sedol spread everywhere, he could no longer contain his AI dream.
Different from many people who make full preparations before doing something, Levy has always practiced learning by doing. "Preparing for a long time without taking action will make people miss many opportunities," and Levy has always been a person who loves to observe and learn, which made him a rare "composite" talent who understands both operation and artificial intelligence at that time.
With his own efforts and the endorsement of his friends, Levy successfully joined an artificial intelligence startup project led by a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and took on the role of COO of the company at the age of 23.
He organized the team, planned the strategy, and operated the company. The inexperienced Levy ran the company in an orderly manner. "This also owes to the professor's empowerment at that time," Levy recalled.
To gain a foothold in the AI field, Levy self-taught all the AI courses published by Professor Andrew Ng on deeplearning.ai and studied Python programming and neural network technology at the same time. "All the knowledge I learned in advanced mathematics and linear algebra when minoring in statistics in undergraduate came in handy at this time," he sighed.
After the first successful startup, the AI industry entered a cooling-off period. It wasn't until ChatGPT made a stunning debut in 2022 that it reignited Levy's passion, who was working in a large company at that time. Levy was pleasantly surprised to find that the operation mode of GPT was exactly the same as the future AI product form he had conceived during meditation. He began to pay attention to the technical information of LLM.
● The future AI product form conceived by Levy in 2016 (Provided by the interviewee)
Illustration: The future AI product form conceived by Levy in 2016
He found that the large language model is essentially doing "the prediction of the next token", which is exactly in line with the underlying logic of "fortune-telling". Moreover, the "hallucination" problem that the large language model is frequently criticized for is no longer a disadvantage in the scenario of fortune-telling. The randomness and creativity of the answers brought by hallucination can make the content more rich and full, which is actually better for fortune-telling.
The combination of two things he likes, boosted by LLM, made Levy extremely excited. In 2023, Levy left ByteDance Feishu. After briefly joining an Agent Platform startup company, he started his entrepreneurial journey in AI fortune-telling.
Levy's AI fortune-teller (FateTell) targeted the overseas market from the start. Firstly, Levy observed that overseas users seem to be more interested in Chinese culture and have a good habit of paying for services. Secondly, he also has his own vision. He believes that "cultural going global" is the general trend in the future and hopes to promote the spread of traditional Chinese culture through AI.
This judgment also happened to fit the market trend - 2024 was exactly the "Year of Going Global", and the wave was strong.
As a product for the overseas spread of traditional Chinese culture, FateTell started a small-scale internal test in July last year. During the internal test, the product was just a multi-agent dialogue platform with functions such as AI divination and wealth and career prediction. However, the shortcomings of the dialogue-based product gradually emerged: even with recommended questions set, users often still don't know what to ask.
So Levy and his team launched "The Ten-Thousand-Word Fortune-Telling Report" and "The Annual Fortune Report", liberating users from the "questioning anxiety" through the "answer-first" model and setting up payment points to increase users' willingness to pay. "Users care more about clear value perception and the psychological expectation of being satisfied," Levy summarized.
36Kr "Career Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
● FateTell product page (www.fatetell.com)
FateTell was officially launched in December, and its monthly revenue exceeded ten thousand US dollars in just one month and continued to increase.
At the beginning of 2025, the popularity of DeepSeek unexpectedly brought dividends to the AI fortune-telling track. Levy revealed to "Career Bonus" that "The popularity of DeepSeek has cultivated users' awareness of using AI for fortune-telling. The order volume of my fortune-teller friends around me has not decreased but increased instead."
"It's not so much luck as an opportunity favoring those who are prepared." In his opinion, practitioners should not be limited by their majors and should actively embrace the fields they are interested in. It is precisely this cross-border thinking of "having the courage to take the first step" that allows him to shuttle between different fields.
● Levy sharing at the startup camp (Provided by the interviewee)
AI IP manager: Find AI stylization in the metaverse trend
Lin Gengxu, 26 years old, former visual designer at Tencent, current manager of Low Poly
In the cold winter of the design industry, there are always some people who can smell the breath of spring. Lin Gengxu, the current manager of DIGIT.AI and former visual designer at Tencent, is one of them.
Different from many office workers, Lin Gengxu only worked in a large company for 12 months before he couldn't wait to start his own business. The entrepreneurial spirit in his bones comes from the influence of his family. "Since childhood, entrepreneurship has been a natural thing for me, just like a seed will surely germinate."
Lin Gengxu's first startup was a struggle for survival. In 2022, when the concept of the metaverse was booming, he partnered with two friends. However, the market was not friendly to this inexperienced Chaoshan native. The metaverse was just a flash in the pan and died out in just three or four months.
However, it was precisely the exploration in this startup that laid the foundation for his next venture. Relying on the technical accumulation from the metaverse project, Lin Gengxu and his team attracted business cooperation with surreal CGI animations to support the team.
