Chinese students are often down-to-earth do-ers, a critical characteristic in LLM era.

Yuxin Wu was my intern back in 2015 and I spent an hour debating with my former manager on the roof of Facebook building, arguing that he should be hired.

I won the debate by staking my reputation on it. Fortunately I was right.

It used to be the case that the business model is fixed and business workflow clearly decouples into vision + execution. Professional CEO/VP/Director focus on presenting the long-term vision, and junior people sit in the war room to do the grudging work to push the numbers up, and no one knows their names.

Things have changed substantially. The business pattern now depends on the technical strength of the models, which cannot be measured by a pre-defined set of benchmark numbers. Too many ways and too much incentive towards reward hacking, if sitting in a big hierarchy.

Technical-first now becomes critical. Sit down and get things to work. Get hands dirty, check the data and code, fast feedback loop, step out of the echo chamber, tear the pretty story apart and rewrite, ready to say "I am wrong". Let experiments tell the issues and be humble in front of AI.

That's why down-to-earth doers shine now. This applies to everyone including co-founders. Anything else follows.