2025 Annual Review: AI, Robotics, and My Journey of Transformation
Published:
Originally published on Substack.
For Yong Qian, 2025 was a year of major career inflection points and deep reflection. He underwent a shift in identity—from Founder to Contributor—while immersing himself in the field of embodied intelligence and striving to maintain balance among professional challenges, family life, and personal health.
1. Career Transition and the “Founder’s Penalty”
This year marked a significant adjustment in his professional identity:
From “Founder” to “Contributor”: After wrapping up entrepreneurial ventures such as OmniEdge and DeepFashion AI, he began redirecting his energy toward contributing as a core member to larger, long-term visions.
The reality of returning to the job market: He spoke candidly about the “Founder’s Penalty”—the bias and skepticism former founders often face when seeking employment. He openly shared the harsh realities of self-doubt, social isolation, and anxiety during this transition.
Experience in embodied intelligence: He joined Qianxun Intelligence in Beijing as an Embodied Product Manager. Although personal reasons limited his tenure to three months, he expressed admiration for the team’s ambition while highlighting the unique challenges product managers face in hybrid AI–robotics projects.
Pragmatism over hype: He proactively walked away from a USD 7 million mining exploration robot deal, citing immature technology. He consistently upheld the principle that “execution matters more than hype.”
2. AI and Product Innovation: “Taste” as the New Moat
AI dramatically accelerated his product development velocity. He argues that as AI takes over much of the coding work, a developer’s “taste”—judgment, aesthetics, and decision-making—has become the true core competency.
AI-driven efficiency: He built the AroOne website in just two days using 100% AI-generated code. Comparable projects in 2024 would have taken several weeks.
Key AI-built projects:
Any4LeRobotGUI: A graphical interface for LeRobotHF completed in under 20 minutes.
VLA Data Labeler: A robotics data labeling tool built using Cloudflare and Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Privacy-first experimentation: Feasibility validation of local VLA (Vision–Language–Action) models on Mac Studio and DGX Spark, with a strong focus on protecting sensitive robotics data.
3. Insights into the Robotics Industry
Robotics—especially humanoid robots and embodied AI—was his central focus throughout the year.
AroOne (Home Companion Robot): Inspired by his personal experience as an only child caring for aging parents across continents, he designed AroOne for the “4-2-1” family structure. Its functions include fall detection, medication reminders, health monitoring, and companionship.
Industry outlook: He predicts that 2026 will mark the first true year of commercialization for AI robots, with Chinese companies leading in revenue generation.
Strategic analysis: He analyzed strategic shifts by companies such as 1X, arguing that the move from home scenarios (NEO) to industrial deployment represents a “strategic retreat”—a way to gather data first before re-entering the consumer home market.
4. Personal Reflections and Life Balance
Beyond technology, he shared deeply human aspects of his life:
Being a father vs. building a startup: He joked that being a good father is often harder than being a founder—a point ChatGPT readily agreed with.
Resilience and health: He emphasized physical and mental recovery, maintaining consistent workouts (such as 30 diamond push-ups) and using AI to optimize health strategies to cope with jet lag and stress.
Social observation: He reflected on aging societies amid declining birth rates and called for the development of more “first-person perspective” datasets.
A Line That Defines the Year
“The real product of every startup is who you become as a founder.”
His 2025 was ultimately a year of resilience. While he temporarily stepped away from the traditional startup path, he continued to advance embodied AI in a more efficient and grounded way—constantly reminding others that technology should ultimately serve human needs.