personal_noteS – shiqiv.com

Model pricing comparison

Meta’s pricing is amazing – it targets eliminate Claude’s gross profit if Muse Spark capability can catch up.

Model	Input ($/1M tokens)	Output ($/1M tokens)
Meta Muse Spark 1.1	$1.25	$4.25
Claude Sonnet	~$3	~$15
Claude Opus	~$5	~$25

With cached input.

Model	Input ($/1M)	Cached Input ($/1M)	Output ($/1M)	Cached discount
Meta Muse Spark 1.1	$1.25	$0.15	$4.25	88%
Claude Sonnet	$3.00	$0.30	$15.00	90%
Claude Opus	$5.00	$0.50	$25.00	90%

However, compare that with DeepSeek.

Model	Input / 1M	Cached input / 1M	Output / 1M
DeepSeek V4 Flash	RMB 1 / $0.15	RMB 0.02 / $0.003	RMB 2 / $0.3
DeepSeek V4 Pro	RMB 3 / $0.44	RMB 0.025 / $0.0037	RMB 6 / $0.89

Zhipu could see some trouble…

Model	Input / 1M	Cached input / 1M	Output / 1M
Zhipu GLM-5.2	RMB 8 / $1.18	RMB 2 / $0.3	RMB 28 / $4.13
Meta Muse Spark 1.1	$1.25	$0.15	$4.25
DeepSeek V4 Pro	RMB 3	RMB 0.025	RMB 6

Also recall that I was mentioning the bifurcation in AI models and AI infra.

US hyperscalers drawdown from peak

Company	Peak close	Subsequent bottom close	Peak-to-bottom drawdown
Oracle (ORCL)	$328.33 — Sep. 10, 2025	$140.27 — Jul. 2, 2026	−57.3%
Microsoft (MSFT)	$542.07 — Oct. 28, 2025	$352.83 — Jun. 25, 2026	−34.9%
Meta (META)	$790.00 — Aug. 12, 2025	$525.72 — Mar. 27, 2026	−33.5%
Amazon (AMZN)	$274.99 — May 6, 2026	$227.01 — Jun. 25, 2026	−17.4%
Alphabet (GOOGL)	$402.62 — May 13, 2026	$337.39 — Jun. 26, 2026	−16.2%

Technically meta was not a hyperscaler.

FCF turning negative and shifting to memory makers is the biggest concern.

The AI death, zoombies, and unsustainables

Some of the notable AI services have been sunset, both in the US and in China.

In March 2026, Sora shutdown was officially announced. The consumer web and app experiences were shut down on April 26, 2026, while the developer API will end on September 24, 2026.

In Sep 2025, 秒鸭相机 (owned by Alibaba) has dissolved the team and news broke out in May 2026.

Baidu’s 文心一言 / Yiyan / Ernie Bot commercialization (membership-based) has not worked; Baidu announced the sunset of paid membership in Feb 2025 and began refund in Apr 2025. The chat function of frontier LLMs in China is basically free for all, but the paid subscription had previously cost about RMB 59.9 per month.

Yiyan service itself has been moved/remade/rebranded.

There are many more.

e.g. in China

Product	Company	Type	Date/status	What happened
Glow	MiniMax	AI companion	March 2023	Removed following complaints involving sensitive content and privacy. It never returned under the Glow name; MiniMax later launched 星野. (21 Economic Net)
Trik AI	Xiaohongshu	AI image generation	Late 2023	Shut after controversy and litigation over artists’ work; Xiaohongshu subsequently launched 奇域AI. (36Kr)
未伴	Tencent Music/QQ Music	AI companion and social app	June 2024	Removed amid regulatory scrutiny of AI-companion content. Mainland services were discontinued rather than merely renamed. (21 Economic Net)
腾讯翻译君	Tencent	AI translation	March 13, 2025	Web, app and mini-program all ceased operating. Translation functionality increasingly became part of 元宝 and Tencent’s larger products. (36Kr)
万物追踪	MiniMax	AI information monitoring	Around April 2025	Entered public testing in January 2025 and was comprehensively delisted less than three months later. (36Kr)
鹿班智能设计	Alibaba	Automated advertising/design	June 30, 2025	All services ended after Alibaba had already stopped purchases and renewals. (36Kr)
奇域AI	Xiaohongshu	Chinese-style AI images	June 30, 2025	Standalone service closed; some functionality was transferred to Xiaohongshu’s 镜构 mini-program. (36Kr)
腾讯智影	Tencent	AI video and digital humans	June 30, 2025	Officially described as a platform “renovation,” but login ended, user data was cleared and its official account was later cancelled. This is best treated as an effective indefinite closure. (36Kr)
异世界回响	Soul	AI character companion	Around September 2025	Reported withdrawn/stopped as Soul reduced its standalone AI-companion experiments. The exact final server date was not clearly published. (36Kr)
狸谱	Independent startup	AIGC anime and fan-art community	October 31, 2025	Officially ceased operation despite reportedly reaching around one million monthly active users during its peak. (36Kr)
冒泡鸭	StepFun/阶跃星辰	AI role-play companion	November 5, 2025	Formally stopped operating after exceeding six million cumulative downloads, according to third-party app data cited by Chinese media. (36Kr)
讯飞写作	iFlytek	AI writing	November 30, 2025	Officially terminated; users were instructed to export their content before closure. (36Kr)
XEVA / X Eva	Xiaoice/小冰	AI clones and companionship	November 30, 2025	Ended all operating services. (36Kr)
Wow AI	Meituan	AI friend and character chat	December 18, 2025	Servers closed and users could no longer access their accounts. (36Kr)
纸飞机AI	ModelBest/面壁智能	AI companion	Reported exited in 2025	Included in the 2025 shutdown census, although no precise public server-closure date was located. (36Kr)
momoAI	清杉信息	AI companion	Reported exited in 2025	Listed among discontinued or withdrawn AI-companion products; detailed closure documentation is limited. (36Kr)
我在AI	有零科技	AI companion	Reported exited in 2025	Reported as withdrawn or no longer maintained; no clear public final-service notice was found. (36Kr)
AiU 爱哟	Zhipu AI/智谱	AI companion	Reported exited in H2 2025	Standalone companion experiment was withdrawn as Zhipu concentrated resources elsewhere. Exact date is unclear. (36Kr)
Lumi 噜米	禹幻科技	AI emotional companion	Reported exited in H2 2025	Included in the companion-app withdrawal wave, but its final backend-shutdown date was not publicly documented. (36Kr)
梯子AI	Baidu	AI search	March 4, 2026	Shut after operating for roughly six months; its site and app-store listings disappeared and functions moved into the 文心 app. (Sina Finance)

Some have become “zombies”.

Product	Company	Condition as of June 30, 2026
胃之书	Independent team	Had gone at least five months without an update by late 2025; user-feedback groups were reportedly nonfunctional or muted. No formal shutdown announcement, but it appeared close to natural abandonment. (36Kr)
AskXBOT	澜码科技	The company experienced unpaid wages, staff reductions and severe financing problems. AskXBOT appeared stalled, although the company website remained accessible, so it cannot be called a clean server shutdown. (Sina Finance)
Vega AI	Independent team	Included in the Chinese-media census of delisted or long-unmaintained AI applications. I found no reliable official closure notice or exact date. (36Kr)
开搜AI	快搜-related team	Listed as delisted or long-term unmaintained, but public evidence is insufficient to establish a precise final shutdown date. (36Kr)
晓象	Startup project	Reportedly encountered major operating and financing problems. Its product activity appears substantially stalled, but evidence does not support a precise “servers shut on X date” claim. (36Kr)
小星星AI陪练	星星趣弹	Included in the 2025 inactive-app census, but third-party download pages continued to appear. I would label it unconfirmed/inactive, rather than fully closed. (36Kr)

Many can be found in the US.

Product	What it did	Shutdown date	What happened
Huxe	Turned emails, calendars, webpages and prompts into personalized AI audio briefings/podcasts	May 28, 2026	Removed from the app stores and stopped functioning. The founders said the team was moving on and would discontinue the product. (TechCrunch)
Rewind	Mac app that continuously recorded and made users’ screen and audio history searchable	December 19, 2025	Following Meta’s acquisition of Limitless, the Rewind app’s screen and audio capture was disabled. Limitless’s Pendant service continued for existing users in supported regions, so only Rewind and other non-Pendant functionality were sunset. (Limitless)
Yara AI	AI mental-wellness and therapy-style chatbot	By November 2025	The founder voluntarily wound down the service, citing concerns that AI chatbots were not safe enough for people experiencing serious mental-health situations. Its website now carries a farewell notice and directs users to other resources. (Yara AI)
Dot by New Computer	Personalized AI friend, confidante and companion	October 5, 2025	New Computer sunset Dot after its co-founders decided to pursue different directions. Users were given one month to export their conversations and other data. (TechCrunch)
Woebot consumer app	CBT-based mental-health chatbot	June 30, 2025	The direct-to-consumer Woebot app was retired; existing accounts became inaccessible. Woebot Health itself did not entirely disappear and continued working on institutional and provider-oriented applications. (Woebot Health)
Builder.ai	Claimed to use AI to make developing apps and websites easier	Operations collapsed in May 2025	The Microsoft-backed company entered insolvency after financial problems, debt defaults and frozen or seized cash left it unable to continue operating normally. Its main U.S. entity subsequently filed for bankruptcy in June. (Financial Times)
Humane Ai Pin services	Screenless wearable assistant for AI queries, calls, messages and cloud-stored content	February 28, 2025	Humane sold key assets to HP and switched off its servers. Calling, messaging, AI responses and cloud access stopped working, leaving most Pins substantially unusable. (The Verge)
Coqui AI commercial operations	AI voice generation, speech synthesis and voice cloning	January 2024	The startup and its hosted commercial services shut down amid funding and monetization difficulties. The underlying open-source TTS code survived through community forks, so the technology itself did not vanish. (GitHub)
Artifact	AI-personalized news reader created by Instagram’s co-founders	Wound down during 2024	Artifact announced that its market opportunity was insufficient and began winding down its app. Its core news reader remained alive longer than originally planned, before Yahoo acquired its technology and incorporated elements into Yahoo News. (Medium)
OpenAI AI Text Classifier	Website that attempted to identify whether text was written by AI	July 20, 2023	OpenAI withdrew it because of its low accuracy rate. It was a particularly clean example of a product being shut down because the underlying AI simply did not work reliably enough. (OpenAI)
Neeva consumer search	Subscription-based, ad-free search engine that added generative-AI answers and citations	June 2, 2023	Neeva could not attract enough users to make the consumer search business sustainable. The search website closed, user data was deleted and the company’s technology and team subsequently moved to Snowflake. (Search Engine Land)

Social paradox

Excerpt from recent readings of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker,

1. We try to gain status by not caring about status.

2. We rebel against conformity in the same way as everyone else.

3. We show humility to prove we’re better than other people.

4. We don’t care what people think, and we want them to think
this.

5. We make anonymous donations to get credit for not caring about
getting credit.

6. We bravely defy social norms so that people will praise us.

7. We avoid being manipulative to get people to do what we want
them to do.

8. We compete to be less competitive than our rivals.

9. We help those in need, regardless of self-interest, because being
seen as the type of person who helps those in need, regardless of
self-interest, is in our self-interest.

10. We make subversive art that only high-status people appreciate.

11. We make fun of ourselves for being uncool to prove we’re cool.

12. We self-righteously defend false beliefs to prove we care more
about the truth than virtue-signaling.

13. We help our friends without expecting anything in return,
because we know they would do the same for us.

14. We show everyone our true, authentic self—not who society
wants us to be—because that is who society wants us to be.

Large IPO’s impact on peers

PL and ASTS peaked about 2 weeks before SpaceX IPO.

Micron peaked about 2 weeks before SK Hynix ADR listing.

Samsung peaked about 3 weeks before SK Hynix ADR listing.

It’s interesting, isn’t it?

I looked it up for other similar events.

Visa was different.

Mastercard stock rose with Visa debut.

Bubble burst?

Fed rate hike in 2026?
Yes 53% · No 48%

View full market & trade on Polymarket

AI bubble burst in 2026?
Yes 19% · No 81%

View full market & trade on Polymarket

The April US inflation print

In April, CPI hit 3.8% annually and 0.6% MoM. Excluding food and energy, the core CPI increased 2.8% and 0.4%.

The 3.8% annual figure is the highest since May 2023.

However, as shelter is a big part of CPI, and Oct 2025 data is missing, there is a one-off bump here (0.6% MoM).

Normally, each housing unit in the CPI rent sample is surveyed once every six months. BLS converts the observed six-month rent change into a monthly rate.
Because October 2025 rent data were missing, the October index recorded zero rent change for that panel. When the same units were finally surveyed again in April 2026, BLS measured the accumulated rent change from April 2025 to April 2026 and converted it into a monthly estimate. BLS says the April estimate is therefore effectively based on the sixth root of a 12-month change, instead of the usual sixth root of a six-month change

Oil price is obviously rising a lot, in March/April/May.

but that has eased in Jun

Other interesting items like tomatoes.. which rose 15% MoM in April, is impacted by bad weather and US gov July 2025 17.09% antidumping duty on Mexico tomatoes.

How high can ads ARPU go?

Bilibili, a younger Chinese user focused video website generates advertising revenue at about 7.5 rmb per DAU per month, slightly above $1 ARPU per month.

That is less than half of Kuaishou, which is above 16.5 rmb per DAU per month, or about $2.4 ARPU per month.

Kuaishou’s DAU size is near 4x Bilibili, so ads revenue is nearly 8x larger.

But these are nothing compare with Meta, which commands about $30-$40 ARPU per month in North America.

So Kuaishou is only like 1/10.

Douyin is the highest in China.

Using $50bn pure ads in China and 800mn DAU gives about $5 ARPU per month.

On top of that there are e-commerce, local services, payments, live-streaming etc. so overall Douyin app ARPU is a lot higher than pure ads.

Just comparing ads revenue: Douyin DAU 3-3.5x Meta NA but ads ARPU is 15% of Meta, which will give you about 50% of Meta NA ads rev of ~$100bn.

Excerpt from 万古江河

明祚二百余年，其实不能与汉唐泱泱大国之风相提并论。其中缘故，可能由于开国之初，太祖立“皇明祖训”，严嘱子孙不得轻易改变他订立的典章制度。固然后世皇帝破坏“祖训”之处不少，这一保守的基调是一锤定音，以致明代政治，难有改革。

…

明太祖废宰相，皇权定于⼀尊，于是⽂官与皇帝之间，无复汉代与宋代可见的制衡。绝对的皇权，保护了保守主义，以致质疑当时制度的思想，都难逃政治权力的压制。皇帝自己不能行使权力时，绝对的权力落在近侍、宦官手中。于是有明一代，自仁宣以后，宦寺鱼肉文官与儒生的事迹，不绝于史书。明代宦官专权，擅作威福，其灾害不在贪污败坏，更在于斫丧了文化与思想的元气。

明代中叶以后，知识分子及社会大众都对上述令人窒息的压抑之气，兴起各方面的反弹。那些史事，将有专节论述，此处不赘。反弹的力量与压制的绝对权力之间，有各种冲突。中国的人才，以及社会的文化活力，都在这一长达百年的斗争中，消耗殆尽！后果是明末的中国，不再有余力面对正在开展的世界新局。能察觉这一变局的人已经太少，更论思考如何适应这一即将叩关的世界形势！

闭关锁国 and 落后 backwardness is a result of A) first emperor’s 皇明祖训 which forbids revolution, B) a lack of a balancing of power, C) pushbacks and crackdowns destroy resources and productivity to move forward.

First quarter China household net additional mortgage lowest in 10 years

For the first quarter of 2026, the net increase in mid-to-long-term household rmb debt is lower than 2015 by ~33%. This is an approx of net new mortgages.

2015 was the year of 棚改货币化 / 去库存

2016 was the year of 房住不炒 (near end of the year)

1q26 – 2026年一季度金融统计数据报告

3月末，本外币贷款余额284.51万亿元，同比增长5.7%。月末人民币贷款余额280.51万亿元，同比增长5.7%。一季度人民币贷款增加8.6万亿元。分部门看，住户贷款增加2967亿元，其中，短期贷款减少1640亿元，中长期贷款增加4607亿元；企（事）业单位贷款增加8.6万亿元，其中，短期贷款增加4.13万亿元，中长期贷款增加5.42万亿元，票据融资减少1.1万亿元；非银行业金融机构贷款减少3680亿元。

1q15 – 2015年一季度金融统计数据报告

3月末，本外币贷款余额91.52万亿元，同比增长13.3%。月末人民币贷款余额85.91万亿元，同比增长14.0%，增速比上月末低0.3个百分点，比去年末高0.3个百分点。一季度人民币贷款增加3.68万亿元，同比多增6018亿元。分部门看，住户贷款增加8892亿元，其中，短期贷款增加2064亿元，中长期贷款增加6828亿元；非金融企业及其他部门贷款增加2.71万亿元，其中，短期贷款增加9543亿元，中长期贷款增加1.48万亿元，票据融资增加1643亿元；非银行业金融机构贷款增加632亿元。3月份人民币贷款增加1.18万亿元,同比少增661亿元。月末外币贷款余额9146亿美元，同比增长4.0%，一季度外币贷款增加341亿美元。

In fact, you need to go back to 2012 to find a lower number.

1q12 – 2012年一季度金融统计数据报告

3月末，本外币贷款余额60.77万亿元，同比增长15.5%。人民币贷款余额57.25万亿元，同比增长15.7%，比上月末高0.5个百分点，比上年末低0.1个百分点。一季度人民币贷款增加2.46万亿元，同比多增2170亿元。分部门看，住户贷款增加4995亿元，其中，短期贷款增加2581亿元，中长期贷款增加2414亿元；非金融企业及其他部门贷款增加1.95万亿元，其中，短期贷款增加1.05万亿元，中长期贷款增加5906亿元，票据融资增加2575亿元。月末外币贷款余额5595亿美元，同比增长17.2%，一季度外币贷款增加211亿美元。