Two former Chinese AI lab executives have stepped back from the frontier AI race to build industry-specific artificial intelligence solutions, explicitly benchmarking their ambitions against Thinking Machines Lab, the Silicon Valley start-up founded by Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer. The pivot, announced on the sidelines of the LEAP East exhibition in Hong Kong last week, signals a growing divergence in global AI strategy between chasing general intelligence and delivering measurable enterprise value.

Why it matters

Zhang Fan, founder and CEO of Yoolee AI and previously chief operating officer at Beijing-based Zhipu AI, argued that the industry's obsession with general-purpose models is misaligned with real-world demand. "All models are relentlessly chasing the ceiling of general intelligence … but in many real-world scenarios, we don't necessarily need an absolute all-rounder," Zhang said. He noted that while current AI models were "extremely powerful", few major enterprises had seen AI generate tangible business value — a gap Yoolee AI intends to close.

What Yoolee AI is building

Yoolee AI, established last year with backing from venture capital firms including Lanchi Ventures, is focused on helping companies build self-evolving AI agents capable of performing tasks currently too costly for human workers, according to Zhang. These agents — spanning verticals from personal healthcare specialists to travel planners — are designed to unlock new revenue streams for businesses in those sectors. Zhang described the start-up as a combination of Thinking Machines Lab and Palantir, the US data software giant that helps governments and large enterprises manage AI systems.

The competitive backdrop

Thinking Machines Lab, launched last year by Murati, has drawn intense attention in Silicon Valley owing to its founding team of former OpenAI and Meta engineers, making it one of the most closely watched AI start-ups in the world. By invoking Thinking Machines Lab as a direct competitive reference, Zhang is staking out an ambitious position: that a leaner, vertically oriented Chinese AI firm can compete with well-capitalised US counterparts by solving problems general models cannot economically address. Zhang joined Zhipu AI as chief operating officer in 2023 before departing last year to found Yoolee AI.

What's next

The industry-specific AI model segment is rapidly becoming a battleground as enterprise clients demand provable return on investment over raw benchmark performance. Yoolee AI's agent-first approach, combining autonomous task execution with sector-specific training, mirrors a broader global trend of AI companies moving down the stack toward deployment and workflow integration. Whether this vertical strategy can attract the enterprise contracts needed to compete with better-funded frontier labs remains the key question to watch in the months ahead.