The To C product "Bubbling Duck" of Step Star will cease operation, and the focus will shift to the terminal Agent | Exclusive from Intelligent Emergence

Text by | Zhou Xinyu

Edited by | Su Jianxun

According to multiple independent sources, StepStar, one of the "Six Tigers" in the large model field, has made the following adjustments to its C - end AI application layout in the past six months:

In December 2024, the role - playing Agent product "Bubble Duck" stopped large - scale investment, and the team was merged into the dialogue product "StepAsk" (now renamed "StepAI"). Currently, only a few employees are left for operation and maintenance.

In response to the above information, StepStar replied to "Intelligent Emergence": In the early stage, we conducted some product explorations based on the model capabilities at that time. In 2025, with the maturity of multimodal and reasoning capabilities, we converged our products and focused on the Agent direction. Renaming "StepAsk" to "StepAI" means its transformation from a Chat - type product to one with Agent capabilities.

In the first half of 2024, StepStar internally established two ToC AI application directions: the dialogue product "StepAsk" and the role - playing product "Bubble Duck". Meanwhile, StepStar also established an ecological partnership with "LiPu", a vertical application focused on second - dimension creation.

△ Bubble Duck.

Many StepStar employees could feel that before Q4 in 2024, the senior management attached as much importance to the C - end business as to model training.

In an interview in March 2024, Jiang Daxin, the CEO of StepStar, told "Intelligent Emergence": "We don't want to follow the traditional logic of customized models plus private deployment... So we choose not to do traditional ToB business and will focus more on ToC."

For example, we learned that although the investment in advertising for each product of StepStar did not reach hundreds of millions of yuan, there was still an expenditure of several million yuan per month.

The talents StepStar assigned to C - end products were also outstanding. Zhang Xinhao, the person in charge of "Bubble Duck", was once in charge of "Pipixia", a joke community under Toutiao.

However, in 2024, when C - end AI products quickly fell into fierce competition, several C - end products of StepStar still encountered growth bottlenecks.

An employee told "Intelligent Emergence" that after a year of exploration, the team has learned a profound lesson in product layout: Don't participate in competition in fields where there are already leading players.

In 2024, whether in role - playing or second - dimension creation, there were already players who entered the market earlier and had more users in the track.

In the role - playing field, there was already "Starry Field" by MiniMax in China, with a long - term DAU of around 500,000, an order of magnitude more than that of "Bubble Duck".

It is obvious that since 2025, StepStar's strategy has been to concentrate resources from weak areas to strong areas: shifting the focus from the C - end to model R & D, ToC, and ToB.

On the one hand, StepStar has increased its open - source efforts and organized several teams with different technical routes internally. At a media communication meeting in May 2025, Jiang Daxin said: "There is a possibility of breakthrough in each route, and we need to achieve a concurrent state."

On the other hand, Agent products have become a new key area for StepStar's layout. Currently, StepStar has cooperated with enterprises such as Oppo, Geely Automobile Group, and Qianli Technology to apply Agents in key scenarios related to terminals such as mobile phones, cars, and embodied intelligence.

The competitive landscape in the AI industry is still constantly changing. Cutting off inferior businesses and focusing on strong businesses will increasingly become the consensus in the industry.

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