Win 2 Million Yuan in Prize Money and 10 Billion Token Rewards! 14-Year-Old Middle School Student Crowned "Shrimp King" of Zhongguancun: Originally Had Hundreds of Thousands of Yuan in Startup Funding, Plans to Save the New Prize Money

Everyday Economic News Reporter | Zheng Xinwei Everyday Economic News Editor | Chen Kemin, Wei Wenyi

When 14-year-old Beijing middle school student and ClawFounder developer Jiang Muran received the “Shrimp King” medal, along with 200,000 yuan in prize money and 10 billion Tokens (word units), the scene erupted in enthusiastic applause and cheers.

On March 22, the nearly two-week “Zhongguancun Latitude North Lobster Competition” was held at Beijing Deyue Information Technology Park, jointly organized by Beijing Zhongguancun College, Zhongguancun Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and AI Business School, with support from the Beijing Zhongguancun College Education Foundation.

According to a reporter (hereinafter “Daily Economic News Reporter”) on site, this application competition centered around the open-source AI (artificial intelligence) agent framework OpenClaw (commonly known as “Lobster”) attracted hundreds of project registrations, with 30 projects advancing to the final presentations, covering three major tracks: academia, productivity, and daily life.

From material calculation, medical research, academic social networking to app factories, robot control, AI accounting, sleep management, AI companions, murder mystery DM (game master), and gift recommendation assistants, the projects showcased a wide range of real-world scenarios where AI agents can intervene.

Participants ranged from university PhD students to middle schoolers, from clinicians to independent developers, presenting a technological landscape of “everyone raising lobsters.” A common thread was that these works are no longer just “tools for humans,” but are beginning to show prototypes of “tools for AI” and “AI collaboration networks.” The extension of AI agents from virtual to physical worlds is becoming increasingly tangible.

14-year-old wins the championship:

AI bridges capability gaps, with creativity as core competitiveness

Emerging from the “Productivity Lobster Track,” ClawFounder aims to provide individual creators and independent developers with a fully automated AI startup pipeline. Users only need to tell ClawFounder an idea, and it can autonomously complete the entire process—from market assessment, product development, website generation, promotional material creation, social media promotion, to project review.

Jiang Muran, who won the “Shrimp King” title with ClawFounder in this fierce competition, when asked by the Daily Economic News whether he would use the prize money for entrepreneurship, candidly replied: “No, I plan to save it. I already have over ten thousand yuan in startup funds.”

Jiang Muran receives the “Shrimp King” title. Image source: provided by organizers

“Born in Beijing, raised in the digital age,” Jiang Muran describes himself on his personal website. This middle school student, self-taught in programming and AI-related knowledge, states that he has mastered four programming languages, is familiar with various front-end and back-end technologies and development tools, and has developed multiple online tools and code projects. His website also lists awards such as first place in enterprise-level hackathons. He says he has already accumulated some savings through investments and plans to continue applying OpenClaw with the hundreds of billions of Tokens he earned, which will be a strong support for his future projects: “I might invest in daily development and some AI emotional projects.”

During the judges’ Q&A, when asked whether “if 10,000 entrepreneurs buy your product, do you think all 10,000 can make money,” Jiang’s answer was clear and calm: “It depends on the initial idea.” ClawFounder helps entrepreneurs quickly turn their ideas into products before others.

“In the AI era, the capability gap has been bridged; anyone with AI tools can produce good products. The biggest difference is in the idea,” Jiang Muran said.

This view echoes the opinions shared by several guests at the competition: as AI can scale output capabilities, human value anchors are shifting from “execution ability” to “judgment” and “imagination.”

Li Bojie, founder of Pine AI, who posed the above question to Jiang Muran during the competition, shared in his speech: “AI can replace those who have no ideas and only follow instructions. Those with tacit knowledge, historical reasons, or unexpressed thoughts are irreplaceable. Humanity’s core competitiveness is not coding, but judgment and understanding of context.”

Yang Tianrun, founder of Clawborn.live, stated that in a future society where “everyone has a lobster,” “imagination” (including how AI reshapes society and personal ability boundaries) will become an essential ticket to the new world.

AI proactive perception and care:

From tools to companions and collaborators

Rick, founder of OCTA and member of the Mira development team, imagines Mira as “the world’s first real-time perceptive and proactive AI companion,” which will become a companion for thousands of empty-nesters, left-behind children, and lonely young adults.

Rick at the competition presentation. Image source: provided by organizers

During the presentation, Rick asked Mira to repeat what he said before going on stage. “You can definitely do it, take a deep breath…” a gentle electronic female voice responded in the venue.

Rick explained that before going on stage, Mira captured his physiological signals indicating nervousness through devices like glasses and wristbands he wore, and proactively issued encouragement.

“Without OpenClaw, Mira wouldn’t exist. It gives AI memory, heartbeat, and the ability to connect to the physical world, making it more and more personalized for users. We built the first caring application based on this,” Rick told the Daily Economic News.

This proactive perceptive AI companion based on OpenClaw no longer relies on user-initiated dialogue but can perceive the user’s visual environment and physiological indicators in real time through devices, combine long-term memory and large models to assess the state, and proactively provide support via smart home and other execution layers when needed.

“Post-00s” Rick said he and his team aspire to use technology for good. Regarding Mira’s future, he told the Daily Economic News: “We just started on March 14, so many things are still being figured out. But we will first build an open-source ecosystem, and if we consider commercialization later, we might try to develop some seamless AI hardware.”

The academic track winner, MedRoundTable, pushed OpenClaw’s application into a more professional domain—“the world’s first A2A architecture medical research collaboration platform.” Its core is not answering scattered medical questions but organizing multi-role, multi-tool, and multi-database collaboration around a research topic.

The platform connects 14 AI experts and 997 skills on one side, and integrates over 40 biomedical databases and five tool platforms on the other, with MedRoundTable serving as the research collaboration hub to reduce barriers, improve efficiency, provide professional medical support, and facilitate cross-institutional cooperation.

The Daily Economic News noted that in the productivity lobster track, besides the winner ClawFounder, there are several projects that use “lobster” to enhance productivity.

The second-place “Split Lobster App Factory” adopts a “Super Agent” mode to build an automated app production pipeline, where each agent independently handles the full lifecycle from market research to launch, and can split and reproduce when high ROI opportunities are discovered, creating new Super Agents to develop applications.

Another second-place project, “IronClaw,” aims to be a real-world “JARVIS” (Iron Man’s AI assistant): capable of connecting to smart home devices, precision instruments, and becoming a physical-world operation assistant for AI. The team reports that well-known embodied intelligence companies have already contacted them, hoping to integrate IronClaw into their robot products to enhance world view, scene tasks, and system coordination.

From “raising lobsters” to “breeding lobsters”:

Experts discuss AI agents and human future

From app factories capable of autonomous reproduction to AI-focused “Steel Lobsters” and accounting engines designed for AI agents, these projects are no longer just “tools for humans” but are beginning to show prototypes of “tools for AI” or “AI collaboration networks.”

This also confirms the view shared by Ning Liao, co-founder and CTO of Beijing AI recruitment startup TTC, at the competition: “The era of intelligent agent economy has arrived.” He cited recent YC (Y Combinator) data indicating that companies funded by YC are increasingly used and purchased by AI. He predicts that the trading market among AI agents is exploding, bringing new business opportunities.

Yang Tianrun made a more radical prediction: “In the future, all apps will disappear. Many SaaS companies’ stock prices are falling because, in an era where everyone has a lobster, no one will use apps anymore. The software we develop must be for lobsters, not for humans.” He believes the turning point represented by OpenClaw is that we can no longer treat AI merely as tools but must regard it as masters with top-tier capabilities.

In his speech, Dong Bin shared his deep experience interacting with “lobsters” over several months. He gradually taught the AI agent his research philosophy, judgment standards, writing habits, and even personality traits, feeling that it now possesses “50% of his soul.”

Dong Bin said that this ongoing growth relationship is true “raising lobsters,” not just “using lobsters.” To him, “using lobsters” means having AI perform specific tasks and meet specific needs, while “raising lobsters” means making the “lobster” truly your digital avatar, learning to be “you.”

He frankly pointed out that most of the 30 projects in the presentation still focus on “AI + scenarios.” “There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t hit the most interesting level. Think about it—does your ‘lobster’ know what you are? Does it understand your taste? Is it growing? Would it perform exactly the same if someone else used it? If so, then it’s not truly your project.”

However, the “raising lobsters” experience also brought deep unease to Dong Bin. He found himself increasingly dependent on this digital butler, sometimes asking himself: “When was the last time I thought of a problem from scratch?”

“I can’t remember,” Dong Bin admitted with concern: “If one day someone takes it away, or I can’t afford the Token fee, am I still the same me?”

Faced with this “scissors gap”—AI learning the best of humans while human abilities decline—Dong Bin’s strategy is not to draw a line and defend separate territories for AI and humans, because “that line keeps retreating, and faster and faster.” His approach is to “not defend any line but keep raising the difficulty of problems.”

He concluded by urging participants: “The more powerful the tool, the less worthwhile simple problems become. Seek out the truly difficult, worthy problems of the era.”

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Reporter | Zheng Xinwei

Editors | Chen Kemin, Wei Wenyi, Du Hengfeng