Inside Beijing's OPC communities: Are AI entrepreneurs' one-person companies reliable?

Over the past week, reporters from the Beijing News Shell Finance have made consecutive visits to several OPC communities in Beijing and held conversations with a number of AI entrepreneurs. Is AI pressing the threshold for entrepreneurship down to the floor, or is it creating a new kind of anxiety? The answer lies hidden in their choices.

Since the end of last year, the OPC (One Person Company) wave has swept across the country. As of now, more than twenty OPC entrepreneurship communities have quietly sprung up in Beijing—from the Zhongguancun AI Beiwai Community and the AI Origin Community to the Module OPC Community in Yizhuang and the Head Galaxy OPC Space in Shijingshan. An entrepreneurship experiment centered on "one person as an army" and "super individuals" is unfolding across this city.

Over the past week, reporters from the Beijing News Shell Finance have made consecutive visits to several OPC communities in Beijing and held conversations with a number of AI entrepreneurs. Among them are veterans who have already founded companies four or five times, a product manager who has just resigned from a big tech company, master's and doctoral students who came north from Guangzhou hoping to "set the standards" in the healthcare industry, and a middle-aged man who quit a stable job of more than ten years and made a solemn pledge to "monetize within three months." Is AI pressing the threshold for entrepreneurship down to the floor, or is it creating a new kind of anxiety? The answer lies hidden in their choices.

Luo Renhao is discussing the company's product with colleagues. Photo by Luo Yidan

In a meeting room at the Zhongguancun AI Beiwai Community, Luo Renhao, a post-2000 entrepreneur, is discussing business with colleagues. On one wall of the meeting room is written, "Youth should harbor the ambition of the swan goose, and ride a fine steed to tread the plains," while on the other side are placed a mattress and a tent. "We probably belong to the type who 'come in whenever we feel like it' in the morning, but we also leave quite late—sometimes when we're urging everyone to go at 11 or 12, no one can bring themselves to leave."

The company Luo Renhao founded, Luo Xiaoluo Tongxue (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., focuses on oncology scenarios and is quite vertical. This AI healthcare entrepreneurship team has four people who work fixed hours every day; most team members are master's and doctoral students still in school, all of whom gathered from the followers Luo Renhao accumulated while running his own media.

Zhang Shun (left) is communicating with a client about business in the office space located in the Module OPC Community. Photo by Luo Yidan

A similar scene also appears at the WaytoAGI Module OPC Community in Yizhuang. Zhang Shun is an entrepreneur here; the Beijing Ai'a Technology Co., Ltd. he founded has only five people, yet "everyone is both front-end and back-end, and one person independently takes charge of an entire commercial product line." Zhang Shun actually has three companies under his name, including an Anhui e-commerce enterprise that has been continuously generating profits. Coming to Beijing, what he wants to strive for is the higher ceiling of AI development.

And far away in Taiyuan, Han Guoguang just resigned at the end of September from his job as a technical lead in the healthcare industry, which he had held for more than ten years, to become a full-time OPC entrepreneur. He recalled to the reporter on the phone that he had once felt "this is how it will be for the rest of my life—just muddle through to retirement and that's fine," until March of this year when he was ignited by "Lobster" (OpenClaw). With a sleep-manager-type product made using OpenClaw, he successfully won third prize in the "Zhongguancun Beiwai Lobster Competition," and only then "made up his mind to walk down this path." Now he has made a solemn pledge to himself: if he cannot get monetization working within three months and his income cannot offset household expenses, he will go back to work.

Among this group of entrepreneurs, Wang Yubo has started a true "one-person company." She once worked in risk control at ByteDance and chose to resign without a backup plan in the middle of last year. What moved her was the rapid iteration of GPT, which made her see that "a website that a team of seven or eight people used to build can now be completed in two or three days by one person plus AI tools." For her startup, she chose a neglected corner: almost all AI music products on the market revolve around Western music and modern music, and people learning traditional Chinese instruments are still manually transcribing scores to this day—and she happens to be a "slash youth" who began learning the erhu at age five and has her own band. With both AI technology and traditional Chinese music performance experience, she founded Shengxu Intelligence in March of this year and moved into the Zhongguancun AI Beiwai Community. In May, she achieved a breakthrough in OMR (optical music recognition) technology, enabling music score extraction and recognition. Without doing any promotion, she accumulated several thousand users in four months and turned cash flow positive.

Behind these people is a path that Beijing is accelerating in laying down. According to disclosures from the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Zhongguancun Administrative Committee, since the Zhongguancun AI Beiwai Community officially began operating in July 2025 alone, it has gathered 57 OPC enterprises, of which 41 are pure one-person companies. On the policy side, Haidian District issued measures in April to provide 100,000 yuan in startup funds and up to 2 million yuan in model voucher subsidies for science and technology talent founding OPCs; the Yizhuang Economic and Technological Development Zone announced an annual allocation of up to 300 million yuan in resource vouchers such as computing power vouchers, and introduced housing incentives of "three months rent-free, 25% of the price in the first year." As of August this year, seven districts in Beijing, including Chaoyang, Haidian, Yizhuang, and Shijingshan, have established more than 20 OPC communities.

Tenfold efficiency gains, but the "last few kilometers" still have to be walked by people

"At least more than tenfold," Hu Liqiu, a former product manager who worked at Xiaomi, Baidu, and Kunlun Wanwei, told the reporter. He resigned in May of this year to start a business focused on AI products in the adult education field. He is now CEO of Singularity Connection Technology Co., Ltd.; the company has received millions in angel-round financing, and its products serve nearly 100,000 users and have achieved profitability. He did the math: for a traditional product manager, a small requirement has to go through writing documents, holding review meetings, scheduling, UI design, front-end and back-end development, testing, and launch—even at the fastest, one to two weeks. Now "it can be closed out in half a day to a day."

She Pengfei introduces the company's products to the reporter. Photo by Luo Yidan

At the "Number One Galaxy" OPC space in Shijingshan, She Pengfei, founder of You Ni Tong Chuang Intelligent Robot Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., offered a more concrete comparison. He left a leading embodied intelligence company in September 2024 to start his own business, focusing on embodied intelligence education, and in two years has produced 13 physical products. He said that previously a skilled navigation engineer needed 5 to 10 days to develop a feature, "now let AI run for a night, adjust a parameter the next day, and it's solved." He himself collaborates with 3 to 4 agents every day: one does courses, one writes code, one does design.

But almost every interviewee clearly drew the boundaries of AI. "The last few kilometers from technology to implementation are still walked by people," She Pengfei said, giving an example: after a visual grasping feature is developed, how to get education users to learn to use this technology—the learning path design in between "R&D is not good at it; professional course staff need to do it."

Hu Liqiu put it more bluntly: "About 70% of what AI produces may be right, but that 30% is wrong, and the business loop can't be closed; people must control the results in the process." Luo Renhao warned that AI comes with a "defensive problem"—it will keep explaining rationality and legality, "even if you use many skill modules to avoid it, you can't avoid it; one read and you can tell it was written by AI"; once the requirement description deviates a little, the answer will "deviate more each time, and by the fifth or sixth time it's not even the question you asked."

Zhang Shun pushed this idea to the extreme. He used the "Chaotic Era" from The Three-Body Problem to describe the present: "With one model iteration, everything we've done becomes meaningless." In his view, AI has lowered the threshold for entrepreneurship, but "if what you're doing now can be casually replaced by others, can that be called entrepreneurial success? You may just have been eating a wave of AI dividends." He also offered a vivid metaphor—AI can help you write code and make products, but "it's impossible for it to help you turn the fish head toward the boss"; those business links that require people to mediate and build trust are precisely what cannot be replaced no matter how strong the technology is.

Wang Yubo drew this boundary from another angle. What she does is not "piecing existing interfaces together and wrapping them in an application shell," but self-developing and fine-tuning large models—in her view, once the former goes live and the business model runs, "it will definitely be copied." She is equally clear-eyed about AI's boundaries: "AI can do a 60-point design; for 90 to 100 points, people are still needed, because it cannot replace aesthetics—aesthetics are subjective, and in essence it is about creating new things." She compared AI to an amplifier: "With a clear goal and clear tasks, AI can complete them well; if you only have a vague direction and let AI fill in all the details for you, what comes out is a neither-fish-nor-fowl mess."

Why Beijing

Since AI seems to make "where to start a business" no longer important, why do they still crowd into Beijing's OPC communities?

Luo Renhao's choice carries industry logic. He came north from Guangzhou; his research background was at the Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, and because of joint training he came to Beihang University for joint cultivation, and ultimately located his company in the Beiwei Community, becoming the community's first resident. "The medical industry is a top-down industry; after a technological breakthrough, it still has to be legal and compliant. Who sets the direction? Beijing sets it." He said this keeps him closer to policy.

In his view, science and innovation teams "can only go far if they go public; if they don't reach the IPO stage, they will most likely either dissolve internally or be acquired externally"—which also explains why he is so committed to compliance and the long term.

For Hu Liqiu, the most valuable thing about the community is not rent exemption. "If it were just rent exemption, I'd be rent-free staying at home too." He said what he needs most is "opportunities for exchange"; in Beijing he can grasp cutting-edge information and there is a more active ecosystem and atmosphere. In fact, he has already discussed with Luo Renhao's company the possibility of cooperation on personalized education based on genetic testing; in the Beiwei Community, the two companies happen to be "upstairs and downstairs."

She Pengfei personally experienced a "chance encounter" style connection: after moving into the Shijingshan community, North China University of Technology came to visit the exhibition hall downstairs and discovered that there was a company doing embodied intelligence education here; the two sides later carried out practical training cooperation, "and now the relationship is very deep; many robot-related constructions are co-created and co-researched by us."

Wang Yubo, who also moved into the Beiwei Community, also initiated a livestream called "Dialogues with OPC Entrepreneurs." After chatting with a round of people, what she values most is the "pitfall sharing" in the community: "The pits you've fallen into, I've definitely fallen into too; if I tell you about them, you won't fall into them again." She also observed a divergence—serial entrepreneurs, relying on more than ten years of experience, can quickly transfer soft skills and network resources to new projects, "naturally having an advantage over first-time entrepreneurs"; while first-time entrepreneurs, including herself, have projects almost all highly related to their own experiences.

In Zhang Shun's view, what the community helps him solve is an account that young people often overlook. The community provides free offices and talent apartments, with water, electricity, and internet all free, "so my entrepreneurial costs in Beijing actually haven't increased much."

Interestingly, some people also use the method of "not coming to Beijing" to inversely confirm Beijing's value. Han Guoguang now works remotely and is often based in Taiyuan, but his clients are mainly distributed in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. He said that on November 2 he will make a special trip to Beijing to attend the Baidu Developer Conference to see the implementation trends of agents and Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE)—"I stay in Taiyuan, but Beijing's cutting-edge information is something I must personally reach for."

Han Guoguang's clear-headedness about AI also extended to his home. After going home, he uninstalled his daughter's Doubao and replaced it with another AI assistant, setting a rule: for a fourth-grade elementary school student, it should not give answers directly, only ask guiding questions. "A lot of teachers ask for personalized things, and in the end it's all produced by Doubao, with a similarity of 90 percent, which gives teachers a headache too," he said. "Otherwise everyone will stop thinking, and human evolution really will be replaced by AI."

Reporter contact email: luoyidan@xjbnews.com

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2026-11-04 13:30

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