天才少年"吐槽"DeepSeek后，反遭Web3投资人"炮轰"

Original Author: Nicky, Foresight News

On July 6, former Huawei "Genius Youth" Li Bojie sparked attention by publicly criticizing the DeepSeek interview experience. A much larger controversy ensued, however, involving a public dispute with his former investment firm, ABCDE Capital, regarding his startup project, Metagent.

Li Bojie detailed his experience interviewing with DeepSeek on social media. According to him, after passing the written test, the process was shelved for nearly half a month. An interview was only arranged after repeated prompting. The interview required completing two rounds of coding tests. During the second round, the interviewer deemed his explanation as "research questions" and repeatedly questioned the engineering implementation challenges, showing a lack of understanding.

During the coding segment, the interviewer noticed him frequently glancing at the left screen and promptly accused him of plagiarism, stating the interview couldn't proceed unless he could prove his innocence. Li Bojie said he felt "seriously offended" by the accusation and decided to end the interview on the spot. Subsequently, he called for the matter to be spread on public platforms.

Li Bojie awarded the 2017 Microsoft Research Fellowship

According to public information on Baidu Baike, Li Bojie was born in 1992, graduated from the Special Class for the Gifted Young of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and holds a PhD in Computer Science. During his doctoral studies, he published papers in top conferences such as SOSP and SIGCOMM. In 2017, he received the Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2019, he was selected as one of the first eight people nationwide for Huawei's "Genius Youth" program, joining the 2012 Laboratories and being graded P20. He served as an Assistant Scientist, eventually becoming Deputy Chief Expert, and participated in the optimization of the Ascend AI chip and distributed training of large-scale models. He left Huawei in July 2023 to found Logenic AI (now Pine AI).

The very next day after Li Bojie publicly criticized his interview experience, a post by Du Jun, co-founder of Web3 investment firm ABCDE, shifted public focus to another dimension.

On the afternoon of July 7, Du Jun publicly accused Li Bojie, calling him "the most unethical founder I have ever worked with." Li Bojie responded that evening, and Du Jun added clarification in the early hours of the 8th, sparking a debate between the two sides centered around the Metagent project.

The core of the controversy lies in post-investment responsibilities. Li Bojie founded the Web3+AI project Metagent in 2024, which is positioned as a token-driven no-code platform. It allows users to create and tokenize AI agents, combining AI agents with blockchain tokenomics. In February 2024, ABCDE Capital participated in the investment. The total agreed amount was 1.5 million USD, with an initial tranche of 0.5 million USD received, and the subsequent 1 million USD conditional.

Du Jun stated that the demo shown by the team in June 2024 was of very poor quality. The project's social media account had only published over a dozen tweets, with progress far below expectations. Starting in July 2024, Li Bojie stopped responding to investor questions, deleted his Telegram account, and left the group. He was replaced by co-founder Zhuang Siyuan as the point of contact. Subsequently, the investment side repeatedly requested complete financial statements but never received an adequate response. Du Jun said he could accept project failure but not the founder taking the money and running.

Li Bojie responded later, stating that only 0.5 million USD of the investment was received, but the company's equity was recorded based on the full 1.5 million USD share. The lack of full funding forced him and his co-founder to take pay cuts, and hiring R&D personnel was blocked. In October 2024, due to family reasons, he was unable to leave mainland China, and believing the Web3 project posed compliance risks, he resigned from Metagent with board approval. He claimed he fulfilled his disclosure duties on schedule before resigning and that the subsequent project followed the agreement, avoiding areas like Web3 and AI infrastructure.

Former ABCDE researcher HarryM posted, stating that during communications in October 2024, the team still presented a rough demo, but their primary concern was when the remaining 1 million USD would arrive. They also inquired about the possibility of issuing a Meme coin. Over nearly a year, they consistently paid lip service to the investment firm's resources and advice.

Ye Su, a partner at ArkStream Capital, also publicly stated that Li Bojie had approached the firm during the fundraising period. The team initially expressed interest due to the good project background. However, during due diligence, they discovered Li Bojie misleadingly conflated firms that had already invested with those that had only expressed intent. His contract terms were also found to be very amateurish, and the team wavered on the token unlock schedule, sometimes saying "let's decide then" and other times changing it to "we can settle on one now." Consequently, the firm decided against investing.

Metagent was selected as a promising project at the BNB Chain Hackvolution hackathon in September 2023, receiving a 2000 USD reward. In June 2024, it won an award in the Decentralized AGI track at the BeWater AI Crypto hackathon.

Its last social media post dates back to June 15, 2024. With no updates for over two years, the project has effectively stalled.

With Metagent coming to a fruitless end, Li Bojie has moved on to a new project, Pine AI. Founded in late 2024, the successor to Logenic AI, it is a consumer-facing autonomous AI agent platform. After a user submits a task description, the AI agent can handle digital tasks like making phone calls, negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions, and applying for refunds. The platform emphasizes privacy protection and holds compliance certifications.

According to public information on the project's official website, Pine AI currently has over 150,000 users, a 93% negotiation success rate, and has saved users over 3 million USD cumulatively. It completed a 25 million USD Series A funding round in December 2025. Li Bojie participated as an advisor starting June 2024 and officially became Chief Scientist in February 2025. He recently resigned due to his research interests shifting back towards foundational models, clarifying that he is not the founder of Pine AI and his departure is purely a matter of research focus.