The AI short drama 'The Girl Who Was Laid Off' on Douyin has surpassed 220 million views, and its AI-generated lead Fang Taozi's personal account gained nearly 400,000 followers in under a month. Unlike earlier AI characters with overly perfect faces, Fang Taozi features realistic imperfections such as moles, pores, and smudged makeup, helping her overcome the uncanny valley and fostering strong viewer empathy. Her relatable story of a small-town girl in the fashion industry has driven organic sharing, with viewers even imitating her looks. The phenomenon underscores that audiences still crave imperfection and authenticity, suggesting that human performers can remain relevant despite AI advances.
Chinese embodied AI startup BeingBeyond, founded by PKU professor Lu Zongqing, released Being-H0.8, a world action model trained on 500,000 hours of first-person human video—currently the largest such dataset in the world. The model integrates latent touch information during pre-training, supports control of over 30 robot embodiments, and achieves 30 Hz inference on edge devices. Unlike many competitors, the company focuses purely on a general-purpose embodied foundation model without building its own robots, aiming to license the model to robot makers and system integrators. The release marks a step toward a model that combines visual understanding, tactile interaction, action generation, and cross-body generalization.
At the second Seamate RTE monthly event, Agora Agent Platform Lead Qianze Zhang argued that current AI agents conflate communication and execution, hindering natural interaction. He proposed a dual-agent architecture where a dedicated “communication brain” handles conversation while an “execution brain” (e.g., Claude Code) performs tasks, sharing context to enable real-time user interruption and calibration. Zhang also demoed embedding Agora’s Voice AI into M5Stack hardware via vibe coding, achieving portable voice interaction and a customizable pet interface. A subsequent panel featuring guests from Google Cloud ecosystem services, AI SaaS startups, and voice products discussed monthly token usage patterns (e.g., Concept’s team of 30 consumes roughly 1 billion Google tokens at ~$400/month; Vm0.ai’s 5-person team spent ~$32k on API keys last month), tool preferences, multimodal interaction progress, the emotional and reliability value of dedicated AI hardware, bottom-up growth strategies, and the fate of SaaS. Panelist Ethan Zhang noted that workflow SaaS like Linear and Zapier are being replaced by agents, while content-input/output tools like Gamma survive, and seat-based pricing is declining in favor of usage-based models.