Hi,
Four times a year I open the ledger. What I called right, what I called wrong, what I am watching next. This is the first one. The full letter goes to founding members. The first part, the grades, is open to every paid reader.
Most of the grading this quarter happened inside the articles themselves. Six pieces went back to an earlier call and scored it in print. You have read them. I will not re-grade them here. What I can do, and what a single article cannot, is lay the six grades side by side. They have one shape. The direction held. A second variable was missing.
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In April I wrote that Zhipu’s cloud margins could approach 30% within a year. They came in at 24.6%, and management added a term the April equation did not have, which was time. April’s formula had a level. August’s has a slope. In March I set four conditions for MiniMax’s escape from the cost trap. By August one split, two held, and one needed a new label, because I had treated enterprise customers and enterprise delivery economics as one thing. For Alibaba, three of the four indicators I set in March now read positive, and the five markers from July are half settled: internal AI spending got a line, cloud orders from portfolio companies did not. In January I wrote that Baidu’s best assets unlock value only after leaving. Kunlunxin’s reported target went up and Baidu’s market value went down. The subsidiary priced, and the parent did not collect. In September I wrote that the real test for Huawei’s folded Kirin would begin when it reached a mainstream Mate. On October 1 it did, in the Pro Max and the RS only. The base Mate 90 kept last year’s chip. The test has begun and has not passed.
One call was plainly wrong, and I have already said so in print. In November 2025 I wrote that for China’s AI assistants the one viable path to revenue was a cut of the transaction. WeChat’s agent showed that claim was too narrow. An agent can be paid for through the payment and advertising businesses the platform already runs.