VC Yang Yi: don't build AI apps now, the frontier period belongs to infra plays
yangyi · x · 2026-10-23
Quoting founder Xu Yanwei: agent startups can't profit by reselling tokens—official subscriptions make Opus API calls feel overpriced to users who demand ROI, while Flash-class models are so cheap that a single user burns through $10 slowly, so person-agents are basically 'selling a VPS with free tokens.'
Yang Yi argues now is a bad time for apps: in the wild-west phase, build infrastructure. Once the roads are paved, applications will explode—the wave that produces the next ByteDance-scale company. Like railways and electricity, chips, data centers and storage won't be the endgame winners; early profits exist only to pave the road faster.
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