The Second Half for AI Startups: Where Is the Money Going?

In a 36Kr conversation, Ji Wei of Meridian Capital and Lui Chun-yung of Invest Hong Kong judged that AI investment is shifting from competition over model parameters to application deployment and the "data flywheel." Coding, with clear feedback, is currently the largest AI application by revenue, with Cursor's annualized revenue rising from over $1 billion to about $2.6 billion within a year. Embodied intelligence is seen as the most active but also the earliest stage; Ji Wei gave a conservative expectation of a "ChatGPT moment" in 5-10 years, while Lui Chun-yung noted that screwdriving still requires engineers as a fallback and that logistics handling has not yet met stability standards, with current deployment mostly in limited scenarios such as patrol inspection.