The Boos at Graduation: AI-Era Money-Making Logic That Actually Works

News Background

Did you notice an interesting and quite surreal news story from last weekend?

At several US university graduation ceremonies, a peculiar shared phenomenon emerged: whenever a speaker stepped up to the podium and started praising AI, the graduates below would burst into boos.

The most heavily booed was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At Arizona State University, he excitedly compared AI to a "rocket ship ticket," encouraging the young audience to "build an AI agent team" to accomplish feats no single person could achieve. The result? Booing erupted from the crowd, forcing this tech heavyweight to pause his speech.

He tried to smooth things over: "I know what you're worried about, this fear is legitimate." But his underlying elite arrogance remained unchanged — his core message was still: AI is reshaping the world, you need to adapt to it and guide it. Unsurprisingly, the young audience wasn't having any of it.

He wasn't the only one run off stage. At the University of Central Florida, a real estate executive called AI the "next industrial revolution" and was immediately booed; at Middle Tennessee State University, the CEO of Big Machine Records faced the jeers and bluntly responded: "Accept reality — it's just a tool."

After the Anger, What Now?

Honestly, I completely understand these graduates' anger and resentment.

The job market situation is something everyone knows too well. And those well-dressed figures standing on stage, looking down on young people and urging them to "embrace AI, opportunities are limitless" — these are precisely the capital and executives driving the layoffs, the ones using AI to ruthlessly cut entry-level positions.

But after emotional catharsis, what should ordinary people caught in this current actually do? Should we panic together, or hope that big tech companies will throw us a few job scraps?

Directions That Can Actually Make Money

Recently, I've spent a lot of energy observing various AI-related startup projects and hanging out in AI forums. After seeing too many grand narratives about "disrupting all of humanity," I've gradually identified an extremely grounded direction: the projects with real commercial futures, the ones that can actually make you and me money, are all about solving the "last mile" problem — the dirty, tedious work.

Don't think about building large language models, don't try to build rockets — solve tiny but specific pain points.

For example, more and more people want to escape the corporate world and build a "one-person company." Here's your opportunity: can you bundle together the extremely cumbersome underlying technologies like Cloudflare, GitHub, cloud databases, and microservice architecture design, plus AI models? Let a non-technical person pay a monthly subscription fee, press a button to deploy their own website, and easily build their own one-person company ecosystem?

In fact, every truly profitable project I've seen so far — ones with strong commercial prospects — all started from an insignificant small concept.

Take OpenClaw as an example. The project was originally called clawdbot. What was founder Peter's original intention? Definitely not to change the world. He simply wanted to connect Claude Code on his computer with Telegram on his phone — just to achieve this one tiny personal need: "remote access."

But if you think carefully, you'll notice that whether it's the "one-person company" service or OpenClaw, they're essentially solving the same core problem: how to better stitch together "existing internet services," "people," and "AI."

The AI Era Business Formula

This is actually the evolution formula I've summarized for future business:

• AI + People: gave rise to奇葩 but effective models like rentahuman.ai — where AI reverse-hires humans to work. Or more straightforwardly, current AI consulting and training.
• Existing Internet Services + AI: this is the "one-person company" one-click solution I mentioned earlier.
• People + Existing Internet Services: this is the programmers and IT outsourcing companies we were all familiar with in the previous era.

So what happens if you completely integrate Existing Internet Services + People + AI? What kind of money-making monster would emerge? I'll tentatively call it truly deployable "AGI" in this context — a kind of super leverage that infinitely amplifies the individual.

My Writing Stance

At this point, I want to discuss something personal.

Although I've deeply entered the AI era and even study it every day, on the matter of writing, I still insist on "absolutely not relying on AI."

Human creation does have limitations, biases, emotional ups and downs. But precisely because of these limitations, content completely original to me might far surpass any perfect AI tool you're currently using — in terms of sharpness of thought, foresight, and resonance with reality.

This also extends to a new direction: the money-making model of AI + Writing. This is a question for you to think about.

Conclusion

I'm becoming more convinced of one thing: stop letting people start from scratch and follow existing definitions for everything. If we always over-rely on existing rules, always chew on ready-made answers fed to us by others (or AI), it's absolutely impossible to generate creative ideas.

AI's essence is the perfect induction of all past data, but human value lies in creating something from nothing.

The future era is definitely not an era of "finding definitions" — it's an era that belongs to "creating definitions."