天才少年「吐槽」DeepSeek後，反遭Web3投資人「炮轟」

Original Author: Nicky, Foresight News

On July 6th, Li Bojie, a former Huawei "Genius Youth," sparked attention by publicly criticizing the interview experience with DeepSeek. This led to a larger controversy, namely a public dispute with his former investment firm, ABCDE Capital, over their entrepreneurial project, Metagent.

Li Bojie detailed his experience interviewing with DeepSeek on social media. According to his account, after passing the written test, he was put on hold for nearly half a month and was only scheduled after repeated urging. The interview required completing two rounds of coding tests. During the second round, the interviewer deemed the content he presented as "research problems" and repeatedly questioned his perception of engineering implementation challenges.

During the coding segment, the interviewer noticed him frequently looking at the left screen and immediately questioned him about potential plagiarism, stating that the interview could not proceed unless he proved his innocence. Li Bojie claimed this accusation made him feel "seriously offended" and decided on the spot to end the interview. Subsequently, he called for the matter to be publicized on an open platform.

Li Bojie receiving 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, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science. During his doctoral studies, he published papers at top conferences such as SOSP and SIGCOMM. In 2017, he received the Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2019, he was selected for Huawei's first batch of "Genius Youth" program, one of only eight nationwide, and joined the 2012 Labs at a P20 level. He served as an Assistant Scientist up to a Deputy Chief Expert, participating in the optimization of the Ascend AI chip and distributed training of large-scale models. In July 2023, he left Huawei to found Logenic AI (now Pine AI).

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

On the afternoon of July 7th, Du Jun publicly accused Li Bojie, calling him "the least contractual founder I have ever worked with." Li Bojie responded that evening, and Du Jun added clarification in the early hours of the 8th, as the two debated the Metagent project.

The core of the dispute lies in post-investment responsibilities. In 2024, Li Bojie founded the Web3+AI project Metagent, positioned as a token-driven no-code platform allowing users to create and tokenize AI agents, combining AI agents with blockchain tokenomics. In February 2024, ABCDE Capital participated in the investment, with a total agreement of $1.5 million. The initial tranche of $500,000 was received, with the subsequent $1 million contingent on conditions.

Du Jun stated that the team's demo presented in June 2024 was of very poor quality, the project's social media had only published over a dozen posts, and progress fell far short of expectations. Starting in July 2024, Li Bojie stopped responding to investor questions, deleted his Telegram account, and left the group, delegating contact to co-founder Zhuang Siyuan. Subsequently, the investment firm repeatedly requested complete financial statements but never received an adequate response. Du Jun said that project failure is acceptable, but taking the money and running is not.

Li Bojie responded that only $500,000 of the investment was received, yet the company's equity was recorded based on the full $1.5 million. The shortfall in funds led him and his co-founder to voluntarily take pay cuts and hindered recruitment and R&D. He stated that due to family reasons, he could not leave mainland China in October 2024, and also believed the Web3 project posed compliance risks, leading him to resign from Metagent with board approval. He claimed he fulfilled his obligation to report periodically before resigning, and the subsequent project also avoided areas like Web3 and AI infrastructure per the agreement.

HarryM, a former researcher at ABCDE, posted that during communications in October 2024, the team still presented a rough demo, but their primary concern was when the remaining $1 million would be disbursed. They also inquired about issuing a Meme coin. He stated that over the past year, the team had consistently been perfunctory regarding the investor's resources and suggestions.

Ye Su, a partner at ArkStream Capital, also publicly stated that Li Bojie had approached the firm during the fundraising period. Initially, the team expressed interest due to the promising project background. However, during due diligence, they found that Li Bojie intentionally conflated funds that had already invested with those that had merely expressed interest. Furthermore, the contract terms sent were highly amateurish, and the team's stance on the token unlock schedule was inconsistent, sometimes saying "we'll decide later" and other times changing to "we can set it now." The firm consequently decided to forgo the investment.

Metagent was selected as a potential project in the BNB Chain Hackvolution hackathon in September 2023, winning a $2,000 reward. In June 2024, it won an award in the Decentralized AGI track at the BeWater AI Crypto hackathon.

Its last social media post was on June 15, 2024, and it has not been updated for over two years. The project has effectively stalled.

With Metagent coming to an end without clear results, Li Bojie shifted to a new project, Pine AI. Founded in late 2024 with its predecessor being Logenic AI, Pine AI is a consumer-facing autonomous AI agent platform. Users submit task descriptions, and the AI agent can perform digital chores like making phone calls, negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions, and requesting 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 negotiation success rate of 93%, and has saved users over $3 million cumulatively. It completed a $25 million Series A funding round in December 2025. Li Bojie joined as an advisor in June 2024 and officially assumed the role of Chief Scientist in February 2025. He recently left due to his research interests shifting towards foundational models, clarifying that he is not the founder of Pine AI and his departure was purely due to a change in research focus.