YZi Labs’ Long-Term Bet on AI and Augmented Human Potential

Author: Siyuan Han, Researcher, YZi Labs

With AI making headlines and filling boardroom agendas, it’s easy to see it as just another trend or the latest tech bubble. At YZi Labs, our investment goes beyond the buzz. AI is central to our long-term strategy because we see it as a transformative force, consistently reshaping industries—from IBM's expert systems decades ago to voice-driven devices and visually guided autonomous vehicles in recent years. Today, large language models are ushering in the next wave of innovation.

The internet made vast amounts of information instantly accessible. In the past, if engineers ran into a coding issue, they’d search Google or Stack Overflow, sift through the results, and manually piece together a solution. Now, with LLM-driven AI, they can simply ask for help – even if the question isn’t perfectly worded – and get actionable answers right away. 

We believe improving LLM intelligence will broaden the scope of automated scenarios, significantly enhancing productivity and cognitive capabilities across industries. Guided by this vision, YZi Labs follows CZ’s philosophy to “understand the world,” which shapes how we approach both research and investment. 

At YZi Labs, we integrate emerging technologies into our own workflows, ensuring we deeply understand their potential and limitations when evaluating projects in the field. For instance, we’ve built internal agent systems and integrated them into our daily operations for data collection, analysis, and decision-making. Through this process, the challenges of AI tools have become more concrete: limited LLM context windows, the need for unified memory management, and inference privacy issues emerged as real hurdles. These complexities highlight areas rich with potential for future investment and innovation.

Another field where we’ve seen firsthand how LLMs and AI drive meaningful progress is education. Giggle Academy – a free education platform founded by CZ – is leveraging AI to make quality learning accessible to all. LLMs significantly lower the barriers to both learning and innovation, enabling their team to rapidly prototype solutions and accelerate development cycles. Children worldwide now have access to endlessly patient, engaging, comprehensive AI courses and even tutors in the future, truly democratizing education.

Beyond the humanitarian impacts, our commitment to AI is rooted in foundational history and principles. We know that the drive to empower individuals through smarter software and more affordable computing has long been a core theme in Silicon Valley. As computing costs continue to decline and AI capabilities advance at an exponential rate, we see an unprecedented opportunity to maximize individual potential. At YZi Labs, we invest in and incubate AI projects just as we do with Web3: believing it will ultimately benefit everyone. 

Sometimes we’d encounter projects leveraging seemingly premature technologies, but CZ always emphasizes fundamental understanding. As a researcher at YZi Labs, I have ample freedom to explore cutting-edge technologies, even those not immediately tied to investment, embracing innovation as foundational to our decade-long investment vision. 

In addition to supporting innovative projects, CZ is deeply committed to long-term investment in talent. He encourages me to continue my work with the Happy-Sci initiative – a project that provides stablecoin grants to Ph.D. students around the world. Launched on BNB Chain, Happy-Sci has now supported over 700 Ph.D. students globally across AI, crypto, biology, and more. 

It was this shared vision for technology’s positive impact that drew me to YZi Labs. Since joining, I’ve seen firsthand how a team of incredibly smart and dedicated people are actually making that vision a reality. As we continue investing, incubating, researching, and building new products for the good of humanity, we remain guided by our core belief – that curiosity, openness, sincere efforts, and a sense of responsibility for the greater good are the keys to lasting, collective progress.