Former Big Tech Designer Recounts 2025 AI Journey as a One-Person Company
A former big tech designer, now operating as a freelancer, has detailed his 2025 experience, highlighting a transition to a "super one-person company" model leveraging AI. The individual, known as Guizang, described a year of significant personal and professional change, moving away from corporate metrics to focus on sustained output and income generation through AI-assisted operations.
AI-Driven Media Presence
Guizang reflected on his self-media activities in 2025, noting growth despite not identifying as a traditional media personality. He outlined his approach to content creation across multiple platforms, emphasizing a focus on engagement over data metrics.
His primary platforms included Twitter and Jike. On Jike, described as a large-scale social network, he accumulated nearly 25,000 followers by sharing news and interacting with peers. Twitter saw substantial changes in 2025 following optimizations by xAI and the Grok model's development. Guizang stated that Twitter became an essential source for cutting-edge AI information, and his follower count reached 110,000. He also mentioned plans to offer courses on Twitter and overseas growth strategies for businesses, noting a significant international following for his content.
WeChat Official Accounts became a major focus, with the platform's commercial value cited as the highest. Starting the year with over 10,000 followers, the account grew to approximately 78,000. Guizang also ventured into video content, achieving strong performance on platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Video Account, with some videos reaching millions of views. He expressed a pessimistic view on the commercial viability of text-based content due to advancements in AI rewriting and creative writing. Guizang manages nine platforms independently, attributing this capability to AI tools.
Community Building and AI Creation
Guizang discussed his experience managing the AIGC Weekly community, which he initially adopted reluctantly. The community, operating on a paid membership model, grew to approximately 2,000 members, making it one of the larger paid AI communities in China. He also explored a new promotional method by integrating community membership sales with the promotion of domestic AI products. An event in early November brought together various AI product companies, resulting in significant sales for participating products.
In the realm of AI creation, Guizang highlighted three key areas:
Vibe Coding: He noted the rapid development of Vibe Coding due to enhanced model code capabilities, publishing tutorials and undertaking numerous projects.
Agents: Guizang built multiple Agents and popularized MCP-related content, including tutorials for tools like Chatwise, Youware, and Trickle.
Image and Video: This area, leveraging his design background, saw the most significant follower growth. He cited viral prompt works following the release of the GPT-4o image model, as well as contributions to models like Nano Banana, Nano Banana Pro, Kontext, and Seedream 4.0. He maintains a GitHub repository for organizing and sharing prompts.
Collaborations and Industry Insights
Guizang also detailed his interactions with various AI product companies and industry professionals throughout 2025, which he stated contributed to his understanding of AI products and industry trends.
He mentioned his advisory role with Medeo, an AI Agent for video creation, noting its support for numerous models and natural language editing capabilities. He also highlighted Youware, a Vibe Coding tool and community, for its efficiency and comprehensive system for publishing and evaluating web coding projects. Listenhub, an AI audio platform, was also recognized for its evolution into a comprehensive AI creation platform offering voice cloning, AI podcasts, and AI PPT/video generation.
AI Industry Outlook for 2025 and 2026
Reviewing the AI industry in 2025, Guizang identified two key technological breakthroughs:
Reinforcement Learning in Tool Use and Programming: This led to an explosion in Vibe Coding and Agent tools, transforming AI programming from an unreliable concept to an indispensable tool.
Multimodal AI: The year saw significant advancements in multimodal understanding, extending beyond image interpretation to include video and audio, enhancing output assistance and reasoning capabilities. Examples included Sora 2 and VEO 3.1 for video, and Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.0 for image generation.
Products that impressed him in 2025 included Chatwise for its integration capabilities and tool support, Manus for demonstrating the potential of general-purpose Agents, and Claude Code for its role in advancing AI programming and human-computer integration. He also praised AI Studio's Build mode, particularly after the Gemini 1.5 Pro update, for its ability to replace backend functions with AI models.
Looking ahead to 2026, Guizang anticipates several unmissable milestones:
Continued Reinforcement Learning Applications: The evolution of Gemini 3 Pro and Flash models suggests further advancements.
Computing Center Construction: OpenAI and Stargate's large data center projects are expected to lead to more powerful models.
Multimodal Field: He expressed anticipation for a "Nano Banana Pro moment" for video, emphasizing the need for comprehensive understanding, arrangement, and editing capabilities.
Vibe Coding: With enhanced model capabilities and improved AI Coding infrastructure, Vibe Coding is expected to experience a "DeepSeek moment" (a significant breakthrough).
Agent Products: While the focus has shifted from general-purpose Agents to vertical applications, breakthroughs are expected in tool calling, context enhancement, and context management technologies.