What "bubbles" did Ge Ling Deep Eyes blow during the He Bofei period that others were reluctant to burst?

“如果说格灵深瞳早期的公关策略效果显著，那只是因为你没看到后来他们为之付出的代价。”

Recently, DeepGlint officially confirmed that CEO and co-founder He Bofei had resigned, shocking the entire AI startup community. Without discussing the reasons for He Bofei's resignation, let's take a look at some of the unseemly PR statements DeepGlint made during He Bofei's tenure.

In July 2014, a recruitment notice titled "Sorry, we only like talented people" went viral on WeChat Moments of computer science students from various universities. DeepGlint showed people their soft and hard capabilities by showing off their superiority. In the same year, stories about DeepGlint were also shared on many media outlets and Zhihu and other platforms.

In these stories, Green Eyes constantly emphasizes the following five points:

1. US$300 billion valuation

格灵深瞳曾无数次在媒体中提到这个故事“一次饭局上，徐小平和红杉资本的沈南鹏、联创策源的冯波聊到格灵深瞳未来的估值。

徐小平乐观地说起码 5000 亿美元，沈南鹏说 1000 亿美元比较实际。两人争执不下时，冯波给出了一个折中价格 3000 亿美元。实际上即使是 1000 亿美元，也足够进入中国互联网公司前三名。”

虽然千亿级美金的未来估值出自徐小平、沈南鹏、冯波之口，但格灵深瞳既然敢多次在报道中提到这一数字，那自然也需要承担这句话所带来的压力。

Now the question is, how was the valuation comparable to that of Microsoft and Facebook obtained?

According to DeepGlint and its investors, they are entering the field of smart security. Security is a huge and underestimated market. In 2013, the largest company in the field, Hikvision, had a market value of more than 70 billion yuan, and its peak period was over 100 billion yuan. In terms of market capacity, the domestic smartphone market in 2013 was 320 billion yuan, while smart security has exceeded 400 billion yuan.

The logic extracted from the words of Megvii and investors is: because the market is huge, our future valuation will naturally be high.

Even if the pie is huge, there will always be people who want to grab it. And what does $300 billion mean? The only local tyrant in this market. This brings us to the second bubble they blew, the competitor issue.

2. No competitors

Some of the recruitment documents of Deepin from July 2014 to now still state:

We entered a market much larger than smartphones, and when we looked around, we didn’t see a single competitor.

Before saying this, DeepGlint had only completed prototype production, so strictly speaking, it had not officially entered the smart security market. In addition, domestic competitors such as Yitu Technology, Megvii Technology, and SenseTime Technology have also begun to get involved in smart security solutions early on. There are also many foreign companies with similar technologies to DeepGlint in the United States and Israel, such as PrimeSense. At the same time, security giant Hikvision also has its own visual algorithm team. Describing a potential red ocean as "not seeing a single competitor", what do friendly competitors think?

3. The first company to successfully commercialize CV and AI

Megling DeepPix also mentioned its identity in the recruitment information:

The world's first company to successfully commercialize computer vision and artificial intelligence .

It is really hard to refute this statement. Everyone can just watch the fun, and it also violates the Advertising Law.

4. Bill Gates meets with DeepGlint

We were the first startup Bill Gates met with during his private visit to China in June this year (2014).

Most people mistakenly believe that Gates specifically visited DeepGlint, but the actual situation at the time was that during his visit to China to visit Microsoft Asia Pacific Research and Development Group, Bill Gates also visited the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator. After being introduced by the accelerator's former CEO Gao Xinxin and others, Gates walked to the DeepGlint office area (at that time, there were 20 startups in the second phase of Microsoft Accelerator), and the scene below happened.

The misunderstanding caused by the marginal copywriting of Green Deepin is that many people think that Gates took the initiative to visit Green Deepin because he admired them. But the reality is that Gates was introduced by Gao Xinxin and took a look at Green Deepin, one of the 20 teams being incubated, which was passive.

What is even more controversial is that Deepin used the word "meet". Meeting: generally refers to meeting with people of the same level or roughly the same level.

5. Commitment to Employees

DeepGlint once sent a letter. The background of this letter is: a graduate student gave up his studies and joined DeepGlint while studying for a master's degree at Xi'an Jiaotong University. His supervisor wrote a letter to express his regret and confusion about his termination of studies. In response, He Bofei replied with the following letter (the second half of the letter is excerpted, and the name of the protagonist mentioned in the text has been blurred):

As one of the first 100 employees of DeepGlint, if Xiaofei fails to become a “successful person” in people’s eyes when DeepGlint goes public a few years later, it will be my biggest failure as a CEO!

Now that He Bofei is no longer the CEO, the above statement has become meaningless.

Summarize

The above five points are all the result of Megvii’s over-the-top public relations strategy.

格灵深瞳作为一家 To B 的人工智能企业，创立初期的公关手段却带着浓浓的 To C 式打法，受众更多面向的是应聘学生，而非合作方和其他机构，宣传目的主要体现在招聘层面。2014 年 12 月，何搏飞在霸面专场的宣传视频中激动地说到他们收到了数以万计的简历，可见 PR 效果之显著。

Although the bubble-blowing method of recruiting people is effective, Megvii has also fallen into many traps because of it: it has been disliked by competitors, partners, media and investment institutions.

Industry insiders have previously analyzed that the core problem in the AI ​​field is too much imagination, excessive PR, and too little implementation. As the AI ​​company that understands the "inside story" best, it should take the lead in bursting the bubble of AI as soon as possible, so that there will be less sighs and disappointment from the public on the day it lands. However, DeepGlint, a startup that entered the AI ​​field early, not only does not understand this, but also blows bubbles again and again, which is really puzzling.

After all, artificial intelligence is a rational market driven by technology, and any superficial glitz is nothing more than the emperor's new clothes for outsiders.

For Yu Gelingshentong, the five bubbles won him temporary fame in the eyes of laymen, but also became a topic of laughter among experts after dinner. Who could he tell about the unspeakable secrets behind it?