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It has been 16 years since the establishment of Meitu Company. To this day, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meitu, Wu Xinhong, still expresses to the media that he maintains an entrepreneurial mindset. He believes that Meitu is experiencing the second round of dividends after the mobile internet era—artificial intelligence.

At the Meitu Imaging Festival on June 12th, Wu Xinhong stated that AIGC currently has about a two-year application time window. "The acceptance of AI innovation is very high, and its self-diffusion effect on social platforms is also very good, which is why we believe it will have a period of dividends. At least these two years will be an excellent venture period for entering AI applications, which obviously has not ended yet."

In February of this year, the emergence of OpenAI's Sora amazed many practitioners, including Wu Xinhong. He expressed in the annual financial report conference call that the release of Sora had a significant psychological impact on Meitu. "We originally thought that such capabilities would be achieved in 2-3 years, but unexpectedly, it was already in front of everyone at the beginning of this year." Currently, the Meitu Vision (MiracleVision) V5 version is based on the DiT technology architecture, which is the same Transformer diffusion model architecture as Sora.

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At this Imaging Festival, Meitu launched six products, including the video generation product MOKI based on the large model. Compared to common text-to-video products, Meitu's video generation product focuses on AI short film creation, applied to animated shorts, online literature dramas, and storybook video scenarios.

Wu Xinhong explained that there are certain challenges in pursuing Sora's technical capabilities and generation effects in the short term. Therefore, Meitu is not blindly competing with models but is finding pain points and differentiated positioning on the application side.

"If we were to directly compete with the video large model itself, our competitors would be all the global giants. We might have certain gaps in terms of capital investment, computing power, and algorithms, but we bring the competition to the application side where we excel, quickly providing a one-stop content creation solution. This is an area that many giants or large model companies have not yet entered or are not currently very good at." Wu Xinhong believes that the application market space is ten times larger than the market space of the model itself. Compared to the general large model selling API model, the application itself has a clearer business model, and once there is a good user base, it can make money through VIP subscriptions and quickly recoup its investment.

The investment in large models in the future still needs to continue, but Wu Xinhong has repeatedly mentioned that he will be restrained in the investment of pure large model arms races. He believes that Meitu is not primarily a model sales business model, but focuses on the monetization of applications. "As a company that has experienced ups and downs in the past, we understand the importance of self-sustaining for a company. Even when everyone is pouring in hot money, we remain restrained, and everything we do must have a very clear scenario and business model."

Pursuing parameter quantity and rankings can indeed demonstrate a company's technical strength and substantial capital investment, but it also means very high costs. Wu Xinhong believes that any company must face the issue of how to self-sustain and develop in the long term.

In addition to the AI short film production product MOKI, Meitu also launched game marketing product Qimi, design service product ZCOOL Design Service, and upgraded the previous Meitu Cloud Repair, Kaipai, and Meitu Design Studio products, targeting the commercial photography, oral broadcast video, and e-commerce design fields. As of June 11th, Meitu's global VIP membership number is 10.63 million, an increase of about 48% compared to the 7.19 million of the same period last year.

In terms of data, the Meitu Design Studio, which targets the e-commerce side, now has nearly 18 million monthly active users. The place with the most usage is the county-level city of Yiwu, and the top 5 are all cities with highly developed e-commerce in China, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Quanzhou, and Jieyang."All of this is happening quietly, and many users are not even aware that the features they are using are powered by generative AI," Wu Xinhong mentioned. In the main products of Meitu, 83% of the features are already AI-related. However, AI has been "overhyped" in this industry, as if having AI would bring about significant improvements. But when it comes to practical implementation, it is still necessary to be pragmatic and allow users to access AI products with low barriers.