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# Product Managers

2026-07-25

Liang Wenfeng Is Now the World's Richest AI Founder — By Doing the Opposite of Every Big Tech Giant

Bloomberg's data: DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is worth $36 billion, doubled in a year, surpassing the co-founders of OpenAI and Anthropic to become the richest person in pure AI foundation models. From a product manager's angle, here's why his 'narrow and deep' bet outran the giants stacking money and headcount.

2026-07-25

AI Tore Down the 'I Can't' Wall — the One Left Is in Your Head

A few hundred people at DeepSeek out-built a company of 100,000+. WAIC opened a whole zone for one-person companies. Three years ago, both were filed under 'impossible.' Most of the walls that fell these past two years were the same kind: I don't know how to do this. But there's one wall AI can't knock down.

2026-07-23

Alibaba Is Doing the Math, Tencent Is Paying Tuition: A PM's Read on the Big-Tech AI Split

Both poured 100 billion yuan into AI. In Q1 2026, Alibaba's cloud AI revenue crossed 30% of external revenue for the first time, while Tencent lost about 8.8 billion yuan. But Tencent wasn't idle either — WorkBuddy became the No.1 office agent. From a product manager's angle, here's the split between the two AI strategies, and where they go next.

2026-07-22

This Round of Big Tech Layoffs Is Hunting the Product Managers Who Just Pass Messages Along

As of July, the tech industry has cut roughly 200,000 jobs in 2026 — a thousand a day — and more than half the layoff notices name-check AI. The strangest data point is Microsoft: on the same day it cut 4,800 people, HR chief Amy Coleman went out of her way to add, 'The roles eliminated today were not replaced by AI.' Everyone else is racing to say 'AI did it'; Microsoft is racing to say 'don't blame AI.' Underneath those two contradicting statements is the same answer nobody wants to say out loud: the first thing AI eats isn't a job title, it's a layer — the message-passing layer. And product managers happen to be one of the most message-dense roles there is.

2026-07-20

Spain Beat Argentina 1-0 and Lifted the Cup, Messi Bowed Out With 0 Shots: What Locked Down the World's Best Was a System

July 19, New York. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 with an extra-time winner and lifted the World Cup trophy. And Messi — in the final of the last World Cup of his career — played the full match with a shot count of 0. In 120 minutes Argentina took just 2 shots, 0 on target, shut down completely. To make the player the whole planet agrees is the best go a full night without a single shot, one defender is never enough — it takes an entire team, an entire system: Rodri locking down midfield, ~70% possession keeping Messi out of dangerous areas, 20 shots to 2. Put another way: Spain didn't beat Argentina by finding a stronger genius; they used a system that depends on no single person to lock down the single strongest person. This final quietly taught a lesson to everyone who builds products and leads teams.

2026-07-20

Why Does AI Keep Getting It Wrong? It's Not Dumb — You Didn't Say It Clearly

You ask AI to build something, and eight or nine times out of ten it comes back wrong, and you think "this AI is useless." But after a few months of doing this every day, I'm more and more sure of one thing: when AI gets it wrong, most of the time it isn't dumb — I didn't say it clearly. Same requirement, phrased differently, and it nails it on the first try. There's a very plain truth underneath this — AI can't read minds. It does what you said, not what you meant. This piece lays out the requirement-writing method I've worked out: the five parts of a requirement that lets AI get it right the first time, the five most common ways of not saying it clearly and how to fix each, and three moves that turn AI from a hand into a brain. All of it is copy-pasteable.

2026-07-19

The Woman Who Built ChatGPT Just Shipped a Model She Admits Isn't the Strongest — and Investors Are About to Value Her at $50 Billion

Yesterday Kimi K3 was still shouting "topped the charts, number one in the world." Today the woman who built ChatGPT did the exact opposite. On July 16, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines released Inkling — a 975B open-weights model, natively multimodal, with adjustable thinking effort — yet in black and white the announcement says it is "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed." Meanwhile this company, just a year and a half old, is raising a new round at roughly a $50 billion valuation — four times last July's. Why is someone who shipped a model that isn't the strongest worth $50 billion? The answer hides in the thing she's best at, and the most expensive thing in the AI era: judging what actually makes a good product.

2026-07-18

The 100 PMs Who Changed the World · No. 3 | Jeff Bezos: At 62 He Made Himself CEO Again — to Bet on the One Thing Amazon Never Pulled Off

No. 3 on the list is Jeff Bezos, OVR 97, with a 99 on the Business dimension — the highest tier on the whole list, higher even than Jobs. Just last month, this man — retired four years, worth roughly $250 billion, free to spend his days on rockets and yachts — made himself CEO again: personally co-leading the AI startup Project Prometheus, which just raised $1.2 billion in June at a $41 billion valuation. Why would a man who perfected the art of "letting go," who designed his company to run without him, step back into the ring at 62? The answer hides in his real invention — a method that forces everyone to first write down, on six pages, exactly what they want, and to write the press release before building anything. In today's world, that method happens to be the most valuable thing there is.