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The middle layer disappears, Token craze ebbs, and the “second half of AI entrepreneurship” in the eyes of Silicon Valley engineers
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Source: 36氪
Everyone is trying to establish judgments about AI, but all consensus is quickly expiring. Interview | Barry Hai Feng Text | Hai Feng Liu Sijie Editor | Liu Sijie Cover Source | Interviewee Photography "The stage of barbaric growth has passed." This is the deepest feeling of Ma Peiyuan, who is on the front line of AI entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, recently. In December 2021, after graduating from his undergraduate degree, he entered Quora, known as the "American version of Zhihu", and later moved to Poe, an AI chatbot aggregation platform, as a senior AI engineer. Two months ago, he joined Cognition, one of the hottest AI Agent startups in Silicon Valley. In May 2026, the company, which was established less than three years ago, announced that it had completed more than US$1 billion in financing, with its valuation rising to US$26 billion. Eight months ago, it was valued at $10.2 billion. In addition to being an engineer, Ma Peiyuan also has another identity - an investment headhunter (Venture Scout). He helps investment institutions find AI startup projects worth investing in, and has an annual investment quota of US$500,000. In the more than four years since graduation, he seems to have always acted earlier than the consensus in the AI industry. Before the word "agent" has been clearly defined by anyone, his team has quietly established a project. When Anthropic was still unknown, they became the earliest deep users of Claude. He was the first AI certified engineer and the first AI agent engineer in the team, and later "brainwashed" the entire engineering team into an AI Native team that uses AI programming. The most interesting proof of this advanced understanding and action occurred two weeks ago. When he was talking to the "Future Human Laboratory", he casually said that "people managers are dying." It was not long before Tencent and Byte announced the cancellation of middle management. Change happens so fast, and in Silicon Valley, you have to live with change all the time. During the two-week gap between the two interviews for this article, Ma Peiyuan found that the logic of Silicon Valley’s “chasing the most expensive and cutting-edge model” that he talked about last time began to fail. What’s popular in Silicon Valley right now