Driven by the wave of science and technology, Internet giants are undergoing profound changes from “explosive growth” to “compound interest era”. Through an in-depth analysis of the financial reports of global technology giants, this article reveals the transformation logic of large manufacturers in the new era: from chasing short-term outlets to focusing on long-term value, from rapid growth to steady development.
I often read the financial reports of technology companies, including those in China and Silicon Valley.
This is not only part of my job, but also a hobby of mine: reality is more exciting than science fiction, and it is interesting and beneficial to spy on the progress of human technology and even society as a whole from real financial reports.
Financial figures themselves are more important, but what is more important is the long-term and fundamental logic behind the numbers: What is the development path of technology giants? What is the driving force behind its growth? How does its management view and respond to the future?
In the last three years, I have read almost every quarterly report of every technology company with a global market capitalization of more than $100 billion. The biggest intuitive feeling is that the era of “explosive growth” of technology giants and high double-digit or even triple-digit growth at every turn is gone forever.
Whether it is Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in the United States, or Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu in China, the direct pull of generative AI on their performance is slow and limited, and the growth rate of operating income of more than ten percent has become the norm; Companies like Apple have even seen single-digit revenue growth for multiple consecutive quarters.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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This is in stark contrast to the era of mobile Internet traffic dividends more than ten years ago, when the big factories ushered in explosive, all-round, and inexhaustible growth! At this moment, only NVIDIA and other computing power industry chain companies can enjoy such explosive growth, and we all know that the computing power industry chain is only a small part of the technology industry.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not because the AI revolution is “unworthy of its name”, nor is it because the power of human scientific and technological progress has dried up. The correct understanding is that the income base of large technology companies is already very large, the level of informatization of human society is already very high, and the basic arithmetic law determines that the performance of large companies will “return to the mean”.
Over the past few years, the technology industry, especially the Internet industry, has actually carried out a series of “sprints”: whenever a new outlet appears, everyone rushes up, striving to run the horse as fast as possible, and then wait for the next outlet, and so on.
This development paradigm has come to an end forever – the future will be a real “long-distance run”, as we all know, long-distance running is not a collection of a series of sprints!
Today, I read Ant Group’s 2025 Sustainable Development (ESG) Report, and two points caught my attention: first, Ant once again emphasized the “AI first” strategy and proposed “dual value creation in the AI era”; Secondly, it proposes that AI has brought new possibilities for inclusive services, and traditional “digital services” are moving towards more intelligent “digital intelligence services”.
Almost everyone agrees that AI is the fundamental driver of the global tech industry in the next decade and beyond.
The key question is: how exactly will AI applications be implemented? Or furthermore, how to ensure that AI creates social value while creating business value?
You know, when Sam Altman founded OpenAI, he asked a famous question: “Will AI destroy humanity?” This question has actually not been answered, and OpenAI’s “palace coup” in November 2023 is closely related to this, which is still fresh in people’s memories.
It is a correct idea to apply AI technology to provide inclusive services to all users, and even rise to the height of “digital intelligence inclusiveness”. Some people may think that this statement is “fake empty”, but looking back at history, we will find that the development of major technology companies is always based on the expansion of the user base and the reduction of the service threshold.
The PC revolution in the 1990s lowered the threshold for computers, the Internet revolution in the 1990s-2000s lowered the threshold for information dissemination, and the smartphone and mobile Internet revolution in the 2010s further lowered the threshold for all personal computing and communication services: these are inclusive.
Microsoft provides inclusive operating systems, Amazon and Alibaba provide inclusive e-commerce services, and Meta and Tencent provide inclusive social services, all of which have become companies with a market value of hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Can we say that Puhui’s AI services are provided by large model manufacturers such as OpenAI? No, it’s not comprehensive – the large model is just a base, and chat is just a starting point for AI applications. All Internet services, even all mature service industries, are destined to be redone in the form of AI.
About two months ago, I read an interview with Ant Group’s management, and one of the sentences impressed me: “Spending money and spending life is an eternal theme.” “Of course I understand what that means! pass
In the past two years, I have lost 10 kilograms, basically abstained from alcohol (except when traveling), practiced a low-carbon diet, and developed the habit of outdoor exercise.
The so-called “money to spend” is not to get rich overnight, but to have abundant and satisfactory financial resources in a long stream; The so-called “flower of life” refers to the long-term high-quality survival as much as possible.
In the past years of explosive growth, we did not approve of these two concepts, and even ridiculed them; Popular are “exchanging life for money” and “pushing yourself to the limit to achieve financial freedom”.
The vast majority of my friends are engaged in the financial industry and the Internet industry, and in recent years, they should be more and more deeply aware of the absurdity of “exchanging life for money”, especially after seeing their own physical examination numbers and housing prices in their communities.
We might as well rise to the level of philosophy: “exchanging life for money” corresponds to the logic of “explosive growth” or “the era of profiteering”, and its core idea is to seize the opportunity to play a big ticket, only recognize short-term high growth opportunities, and completely ignore the issue of sustainable development; “Money to spend, life to spend” corresponds to the “era of compound interest”, which is the logic of the era we are currently in.
The power of compound interest is far beyond the intuitive impression of ordinary people. The annualized growth rate of 12% means that it will double in 6 years; The annualized growth rate of 8% means that it has doubled in 9 years. Buffett’s annualized return is about 20%, which is enough to make him the most successful investor in the world.
Only sound companies can fully benefit from compound interest. As a former investment analyst, I still remember that the capital market modeled popular companies, often predicting sharp growth of 30-50% in the short term. Many companies did, but then stood still or even grew negatively until they disappeared from the mainstream view.
“Spending money”, that is, the preservation and appreciation of wealth, can rely on windfall profits in a very short time frame, but in the final analysis, it relies on compound interest.
“Life flower”, that is, health management, is a complete compound interest problem: as far as I know, there seems to be no magic bullet in the world that can make people healthy overnight.
Interestingly, the financial industry and the medical industry are precisely the two industries with the fastest progress and the most new things in AI transformation, and they are also the industries most likely to take the lead in realizing “inclusive services” driven by AI.
Let’s talk about the financial industry first: In 2024, Goldman Sachs clearly mentioned in the earnings call that a quarter of its employees are already “technology developers”; In June this year, Goldman Sachs’ chief information officer announced to all employees the launch of the “GS AI” artificial intelligence assistant, which is not a general application, but aimed at investment banking, research, asset management, wealth management…… and other business departments. Moreover, Goldman Sachs is not even the first Wall Street investment bank to promote AI assistants at the group level, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America have already made similar attempts.
In fact, AI’s intervention in financial business processes is almost all-round, and in another year or two, we may not find any financial business link that has not been deeply transformed by AI!
Wealth management is the fastest-changing financial segment: UBS, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase’s wealth management departments have all launched AI platforms based on machine learning and natural language recognition to analyze market data and customer trading behavior to provide real-time investment advice to customers; Robo-advisor firms such as Betterment, Wealthfront, and Pefin have built a large client base, with Wealthfront’s AUM reaching $80 billion (March 2025 data).
AI-driven wealth management has been one of the hottest outlets in Silicon Valley venture capital circles in recent years, and according to Forbes magazine, AI investment advisors may participate in more than $400 billion in assets under management in the United States alone.
In China, a number of AI investment consultants such as Ant’s “Ant Xiaocai”, JD.com’s “Jing Xiaobei”, and Yingmi Fund’s “AI Xiaogu” have also emerged, or more comprehensive “wealth stewards” than investment consultants.
Just a few days ago, a friend who is engaged in family trust business told me that he believes that AI wealth management will become a great “equalizer”, allowing ordinary people to enjoy financial services that only ultra-high-net-worth people can enjoy at a lower cost – asset allocation plans customized according to the actual situation of the family, specific product recommendations, regular exclusive evaluation reports, real-time advice for market emergencies, tax planning and even wealth inheritance plans…… These services, which traditionally required huge asset sizes and high management fees or commissions, can now be efficiently generated by AI and may be more accurate than humans.
This is the power of “inclusive finance”!
As a side note, I think the financial industry may be one of the very few industries that really needs a “vertical model” because its business is too complex and involves many sensitive areas such as customer privacy, information security, risk control, and supervision.
Ant and Du Xiaoman are developing their own vertical large models; Even general-purpose large models need to be fine-tuned for financial scenarios, and many financial institutions are doing this for open source large models such as DeepSeek.
In the era of generative AI, the “scientific and technological attributes” of finance will become more important than ever, and the development of “inclusive finance” will largely depend on the research and development progress of core technologies such as the base large model. Financial institutions must become tech companies, not just shouting slogans!
Let’s talk about the medical industry.
As early as around 2010, as the first professional AI assistant to be put into commercial use, IBM Watson tried to use medical care as a breakthrough, but unfortunately the AI technology based on knowledge graph at that time could not complete this important task.
AI based on deep learning technology and natural semantic recognition capabilities can finally transform the medical industry.
At the beginning of this year, the U.S. Department of Health released a more than 200-page “AI Healthcare Strategic Plan”, proposing the application of AI to the “five basic areas” of medical care, namely medical research, new drug development, medical services, humanitarian services, and public health; All in all, it is to use AI technology to reshape the entire medical industry chain.
In fact, China’s use of AI to transform healthcare is also gaining momentum, and there is even a possibility that it will catch up: in just two or three weeks after the launch of DeepSeek R1, at least 92 public hospitals have connected to DeepSeek. Tens of millions of yuan of artificial intelligence system procurement orders from hospitals around the world have emerged one after another, and perhaps the nearest tertiary hospital to your home has just made purchases.
The importance of AI in medical and drug research and development and internal management of hospitals has long been recognized, but I think what is more important is the “equality of medical services” based on AI: allowing AI to reduce the difficulty and complexity of ordinary people to obtain medical services, while reducing the ineffective labor of the public health system. Find a doctor, test your health, read reports, accompany doctors, ask about medical insurance…… These all require a lot of time, and it may not be easy to spend money, let alone not spend money? An important selling point of many high-end credit cards in China is actually “several accompanying medical services a year”.
I still remember the painful experience of suffering from heart disease more than three years ago when I was worried about heart disease due to palpitations caused by wisdom tooth extraction – just to determine which department to go to to study and prepare, and running up and down for another half day to get tested. Fortunately, the test results were not abnormal, which made me no longer care about the difficulties I experienced, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Now, more than one major domestic manufacturer has launched AI medical service tools for individual users, such as ByteDance’s Xiaohe AI doctor, Tencent’s AI health management assistant, and so on. About five days ago, Ant just launched the AI health application “AQ”, which includes hundreds of functions such as health science popularization, medical consultation, report interpretation, and health records.
There are two features that appeal to me the most about Ant AQ:
The first is personal health records, which can combine medical treatment, medication, exercise, diet and other information, plus the opening up of a variety of wearable smart hardware, establish a complete and personalized “health database”, put forward health suggestions in a timely manner, and help users be prepared;
The second is “cloud escort”, which has covered more than 200 hospitals across the country, and when users go to offline medical treatment, AI can provide guidance online to help patients complete the entire medical treatment process efficiently and without detours. These are just two simple microcosms of AI-driven “inclusive healthcare”.
It’s still the old saying – AI medical care is also a great “equalizer”, and its power has only been developed in a small part. For example, the above-mentioned Ant AQ can already provide the “AI clone” agent of nearly 200 famous doctors, even an elderly person in a remote province or poor area can consult the famous doctor of Peking University Hospital at any time about health problems.
Of course, it must be admitted that what “AI clones” can do is still relatively limited, and the coverage is narrow, which cannot replace actual medical treatment; But what about another five or ten years?
Since the birth of ChatGPT, in just over two years, we have become accustomed to letting AI help us check information, write articles, and compile programs, which has greatly improved work efficiency; Even if we may never be able to replace real doctors, as long as it can help doctors share a little more daily tasks, it may mean an improvement in the quality of life for thousands of ordinary people.
The inclusive significance of this technological progress to society cannot be overestimated!
I hope that by the time I and the readers of this article grow old, such applications will be fully mature.
I would also like to emphasize that the exciting vision described above, whether it is “financial inclusion” or “healthcare inclusion”, will take a certain amount of time to realize, relying not only on technological advancements, but also on resolving compliance, ethics and other issues. As for their promotion of the performance of large manufacturers themselves, their timetable is even more uncertain, after all, large manufacturers need to provide users with inclusive services before they can improve their commercialization.
Investors and professional media who are accustomed to the “stormy” growth of the mobile Internet era may feel that this development is too slow, and even dismiss it as shouting slogans and being pragmatic.
Among my friends, there are still many people who are skeptical or negative about the entire AI wave, and their core argument is that “the growth brought by AI is not as immediate as the Internet back then.”
At the time of writing, I have just left Azerbaijan, the only oil exporter among the three Caucasus countries, and experienced an “economic miracle” more than a decade ago: from 2005 to 2008, due to high global oil prices, Azerbaijan’s GDP increased by 2.7 times, and per capita income soared from 15% of the United States to 30% of the United States! Unfortunately, the good times did not last long, with the fall in oil prices and the instability of the geopolitical landscape, the country’s economic growth rate returned to single digits after 2009, and there were many negative real GDP growths.
Azerbaijan’s industrial chain is still very imperfect, and it is also a typical developing country at the cultural and social levels. Last year, its GDP per capita was exactly half that of China. More than half of the ride-hailing I took on the streets of Baku was imported from China (BYD is especially numerous)!
This may be an excellent real-life case of the “era of huge profits” VS the “era of compound interest”: relying on the export of natural resources such as oil can boost short-term growth at one time, but long-term success depends on infrastructure, culture and education, scientific and technological research and development and industrial chain layout.
Azerbaijan and Georgia, where I am at this time, are upgrading infrastructure on a large scale (many of which are still Chinese companies participating in construction) and developing public education, which shows that they have already fully realized this.
The same applies to enterprises, especially the so-called large factories. If you have read the annual reports of all major Internet companies in China, you will find that almost all of them emphasize similar things: driving long-term value with scientific and technological innovation and pursuing sustainable development.
I would also like to add: the key to sustainable development is to grasp the main theme of each era, the main theme of our era, which may be “money to spend, life to spend”; Although some may prefer crepe, theoretical expressions.
I love “Star Trek”, and the most famous line of this classic science fiction film and television drama is: Live long and prosper. When “Star Trek” was born, AI was just an ethereal phantom, so this line is just a blessing and does not tell us how to do it.
Today, we may add the second half: With the help of AI. Whoever can be the first to turn this sentence into reality will occupy the commanding heights of the new era, whether it is an Internet giant, a startup company, or a still unknown passer-by.
That’s why I like to read big company earnings reports: who recognizes what the future looks like, who is fully prepared for the future, and who can “realize the future” most efficiently – these questions can be found in the financial reports.
It is not necessarily a complete answer, but at least a part of the answer is enough to provoke us to think deeply.
