"1 Person + 10,000 GPUs" - Can This Formula Create a Unicorn? OpenAI's Prophecy Is Being Verified in Shanghai

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that in the future, one person plus ten thousand dollars worth of GPUs could create a billion-dollar unicorn.

Sam Altman.

Whether Altman’s prediction will come true is being tested in the artificial intelligence innovation towns in North Xuhui Yangpu Zhangjiang. Here, a group of OPCs (one-person companies) is rapidly gathering, with many founders even eager to graduate early.

Current Founders

Peng Zimian, a PhD student at Shanghai Chuangzhi College, registered Suiyue Intelligence a few months ago.

Peng Zimian chose to start a business rather than seek employment.

Vibe coding has made him restless. This AI programming buzzword for 2025 allows users to create websites, mini-programs, and even games by describing ideas to AI, without writing code. With Vibe coding, Austrian tech geek Peter Steinberg developed the open-source personal AI agent project OpenClaw in just ten days, which exploded globally and made him a “super individual” in the AI era.

Peter Steinberg developed the globally popular OpenClaw.

Peng Zimian aims to build a technical backend for super individuals. He believes that open-source supply is unprecedentedly booming, and super individuals need an Agent (intelligent agent) to help lower the barriers to using open-source full chain.

Currently, Peng Zimian has secured funding from Qiji Chuangtan, and his product is undergoing paid validation.

Qiji Chuangtan, founded by former Microsoft and Baidu executive Dr. Lu Qi, is a benchmark angel investment platform in AI hardware technology. It incubates about 120 projects annually, providing each with a $300,000 seed fund, but the acceptance rate is less than 1%.

Qiji Chuangtan, founded by former Microsoft and Baidu executive Dr. Lu Qi.

Similarly, doctoral student Zhang Kexin is also racing against time, founding a drug design platform called “Lüsheng Wanyou.”

According to Zhang Kexin, some specialized models in biomedicine are “powerful but expensive,” making them hard for scientists and pharmaceutical R&D personnel to accept. Zhang aims to integrate AI resources to offer a more cost-effective and efficient drug design platform. On his Lüsheng Wanyou platform, the time to connect a molecule has been compressed from dozens of seconds via traditional methods to just a few tenths of a second.

Zhang Kexin shared a real-life story with reporters, which is also his aspiration—four years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg laid off a protein team of over ten scientists. Unwilling to accept this, they started an AI protein company. Two years later, Zuckerberg had to buy it back at several times the original cost.

Combining his previous internship at ByteDance and involvement in developing a large scientific model, Zhang believes that major domestic and international tech companies will continue to make more refined moves in “AI + scientific research,” which is a key reason for his quick entry.

Fear of Missing Out

Ding Juntao also fears missing out.

As the founder of Gusu Technology, he clearly sees the demand—platforms like Xiaohongshu need “daily updated” videos to attract traffic, but video production is time-consuming. They urgently need an Agent to help screen clips, craft stories, write scripts, and edit videos. Currently, Gusu Technology’s Agent product is inviting initial users for in-depth testing.

Ding Juntao said, “The market is starving for this, and leading companies haven’t acted yet. If I miss this wave, I will regret it!”

His company, including himself and two co-founders, has six people in total, with three interns. Ding is relatively calm because, under AI empowerment, “a single person can now do everything that previously required a team—OPC naturally emerges.”

OPC, literally “one-person company,” is commonly used to refer to lightweight startups operated by very small teams. According to the AI department of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, OPC emphasizes the efficiency change of “people + AI,” and most AI companies with fewer than 20 employees can be considered OPCs.

OPC allows a self-proclaimed “pure liberal arts student” screenwriter Zhang Chenchen to “form a team alone,” founding Liu Meng Culture.

Zhang Chenchen explained that her two dramas took six and eight years respectively to finally air on Hunan TV and Tencent platforms. It wasn’t until someone suggested she try large models that she took action. Last year, SenseTime launched the intelligent agent Seko. She experimented with input prompts and scene adjustments, and within a week, decided to establish her own company to enter the AI short drama track.

She said AI gave her courage and amplified her personal ability and creative stories exponentially.

SenseTime’s Seko 2.0 makes “one-person crews” in the short and manga drama industry possible.

Yang Yang is also operating with a lightweight approach.

She has a bachelor’s and master’s in coding, then pursued a PhD in psychology at Southwest University in the US. Now, she founded Pounders, focusing on non-invasive brain-machine interfaces. Pounders developed its own chips, creating the world’s first 64-dimensional emotion model, and developed intervention schemes covering audio, video, and gaming, offering services in cognitive rehabilitation, emotion analysis, and health warning. One of Pounders’ consumer brain-machine headbands quickly became the top seller on JD.com within three months of launch.

A consumer brain-machine headband from Pounders.

Yang Yang explained that the minimal team for running a high-tech product is just four people: herself, one hardware engineer, one software engineer, and an artist/developer.

With such a lean team, the secret is AI. For example, developing therapeutic audio, video, and games that traditionally take one to two years can now be demoed in a day with AI assistance. Additionally, Pounders can process over 20 user feedbacks daily, reducing product development to about two weeks. Yang Yang said, “Academic background is no longer as important; computing power and creativity are key.”

And “Comrades”

Shanghai, keenly aware of OPC trends, is also agile in deployment.

Since last August, when the Lingang “Super Individual 288 Action” was launched, to December, when Pudong and Xuhui introduced special policies supporting OPCs, over 600 OPCs have settled in the two key innovation towns—Xuhui Beiyang and Pudong Zhangjiang AI Innovation Town.

The service capacity of a “dedicated government” behind OPCs will determine their quantity and quality.

Mid-2023, Kong Xiangyu resigned from his job in the US to focus on “AI + Education,” founding an OPC. He was once torn over which city to settle in. While researching policies to attract tech talent, he was touched by the details in the Shanghai Pudong International Talent Port mini-program—each step of the application process had a contact person and phone number, emphasizing reliability.

Now, Kong Xiangyu’s Lingohow has moved into the East Tower of Zhangjiang Science City’s Twin Towers, enjoying a six-month rent-free period for four workstations. What reassured him even more was the support from Zhangjiang AI Innovation Town—offering computing power vouchers, model vouchers, and corpus subsidies, which eliminated his initial startup cost concerns and allowed for more aggressive moves.

Zhangjiang Science City Twin Towers.

In Zhangjiang and Beiyang, whether it’s Shengxi Fasuo working on “AI + Law” or Gusu Technology creating AI video editing tools, the government helps “shake” investors. Lin Le, deputy director of the Xuhui AI special team, said that Xuhui has set up a youth entrepreneurship fund, known as the “Early Bird Fund.” In less than three months, Beiyang AI Innovation Town has completed 50 seed investments.

In the eyes of many OPC founders, the innovation towns are not just “landlords,” but “comrades.” Yang Yang said that when companies focus on “hammers” (technology), the government always reminds and recommends “nails” (scenarios). Within a week of Pounders’ arrival in Shanghai, they negotiated a major health cooperation with a large enterprise with over 50 chain stores. Considering brain-machine control of embodied intelligent robots, Zhangjiang also enthusiastically recommended local humanoid robot resources to Pounders.

The reporter saw in the policy packages of both innovation towns that the “comrades” provide meticulous services for OPCs—from talent apartments, financing, and application scenario support to offering display windows, supporting overseas orders, and providing agency bookkeeping and legal services.

OPCs are highly efficient but not fighting alone. AI lowers the barrier to entrepreneurship, but a city’s overall attitude and structure raise the ceiling of what can be achieved.