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Original Title: 2025 AI创业真相 Published On: 2025.08.27 Author: 陶天宇 (Tao Tian Yu)， 郭虹妘 (Guo Hong Yun) Source: 钛媒体创投家 (tmtpost) Article Link A day in AI is a year in the real world. Just as the dust on the battlefield of large language models has begun to settle, the Agent wave surges forth. As inference costs plummet, the once-imposing technical barriers have crumbled, bringing all those who harbored hopes and aspirations for AI back to the same starting line. Entrepreneurs, invigorated by these open waters, are pouring in their creativity and ambitions to seize the first mover advantage. However, beneath the heels of this technological stampede lies critical questions of survival in China's AI ecosystem. TMTPost Venture Capital spent a month conducting in-depth face-to-face interviews with twelve independent developers, five AI community moderators, and seven top investors, to compile this article. These voices paint a picture of the lived reality for China's AI entrepreneurs—not as glamorous as the press conferences, but genuine. Consumer Habits Whenever discussing systemic issues in the domestic AI ecosystem, it’s the industry’s consensus that the discussions start with consumer habits. But just how bad are these habits? From the data we've compiled from reports and news articles, consumers in the North American[1] market are 3-4 times more willing to pay than consumers in China. The ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) of leading AI companies is five to one hundred times higher in North America and the average annual procurement budget for North American businesses is nearly 10 times higher. Source：a16z《2024 State of AI Consumer Apps》、Bessemer《State of the Cloud 2024》、IT 桔子《2024 中美 AI 商业化对比报告》 Besides the data from these reports, the responses from several open-source contributors paints a clear picture. One developer stated that an Agentic product that his team in China developed had garnered tens of thousan