Roasting China’s AI Industry

In a ChinaTalk interview, Xianyu, the writer behind the satirical blog "Funeral AI" (葬AI), discusses why AI writing isn't funny, how he built MemeBench — a public arena where ordinary users rank video models by meme-ability — and why Five-Year Plans function as a kind of benchmark while "AGI" lacks quantitative indicators. He describes recruiting about 300 students via QQ to seed the rankings, and recounts that MiniMax's open-source H3 beat ByteDance's Seedance in the meme arena, prompting ByteDance to question the result and MiniMax to complain about an earlier article. He also argues that Chinese AI startup themes rotate every three months following Silicon Valley, with many "world models" actually being post-trained versions of Alibaba's Wan video model.