StepFun CEO Yin Qi Charts 'Chicken and Egg Together' Strategy, Diverging from Zhipu and Doubao

StepFun founder and CEO Yin Qi laid out a distinctive strategic vision in a recent interview with Times Online: build the foundational model and the end-user product at the same time — making "the chicken and the egg together." The statement clearly differentiates StepFun from other major Chinese AI startups.

In China's large-model race, Zhipu AI has long concentrated on model capability as its core strength, while ByteDance's Doubao excels at consumer-facing applications, leveraging ByteDance's massive traffic ecosystem. Yin Qi acknowledged that both paths have merits but argued StepFun needs a more integrated approach.

The "chicken and egg together" strategy means model R&D and product deployment advance in lockstep, rather than the conventional sequence of completing model training before seeking application scenarios. Yin Qi believes that in the fast-moving AI landscape, model iteration and user experience are tightly coupled, and separating them slows overall progress.

StepFun has built its reputation on multimodal large models, releasing the Step series with capabilities in image understanding, video generation, and more. In the interview, Yin Qi further clarified the commercialization direction: models must not only perform well technically but also deliver tangible experiences users can directly perceive.

This strategic choice reflects the realities of China's AI startup environment. The foundational model track has become a red ocean, with pure-model companies facing profitability pressure. Meanwhile, application-only startups confront traffic moats built by tech giants. StepFun aims to find balance between these extremes.

Yin Qi did not disclose specific product launch timelines but emphasized that the company is in a "critical investment phase," requiring sustained spending on talent, compute, and product development. For a startup that has not yet achieved规模化 revenue, this means fundraising cadence and capital efficiency will face intense scrutiny.

From an industry perspective, StepFun's approach represents a notable trend among Chinese AI startups: refusing to choose between "model camp" and "application camp," instead attempting integrated competitiveness. Whether this model works will depend on the company's ability to execute at a high level in both technology and product simultaneously.