Author:Nicky,Foresight News
On July 6, former Huawei "Genius Teen" Li Bojie attracted attention for publicly criticizing his DeepSeek interview experience. The bigger ensuing controversy, however, was the public dispute between him and his former investment firm, ABCDE Capital, surrounding the startup project Metagent.
Li Bojie detailed his experience interviewing with DeepSeek on social media. According to his account, after passing the written test, he was left in limbo for nearly half a month and only got an interview scheduled after repeated follow-ups. The interview required completing two rounds of coding tests. During the second round, the interviewer considered his discussion topics as "research problems," repeatedly questioning the challenges of engineering implementation while showing a lack of understanding.
During the coding session, the interviewer noticed him frequently looking at the left-side screen and immediately questioned possible plagiarism, stating that the interview could not continue unless he proved his innocence. Li Bojie stated this accusation made him feel "severely offended," and he decided to end the interview on the spot. Subsequently, he called for spreading the incident on public platforms.
Li Bojie received the 2017 Microsoft Research Fellowship
According to public information on Baidu Baike, Li Bojie was born in 1992, graduated from the Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science. During his Ph.D., he published papers in top conferences like SOSP and SIGCOMM. In 2017, he received the Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2019, he was selected as one of only eight people nationwide for Huawei's first batch of the "Genius Teen" program, joining the 2012 Labs with a P20 rating, progressing from Assistant Scientist to Associate Chief Expert, working on Ascend AI chip optimization and large-scale model distributed training. In July 2023, he left Huawei to found Logenic AI (now Pine AI).
The day after Li Bojie publicly criticized his interview experience, a post by Du Jun, co-founder of the Web3 investment firm ABCDE, shifted the focus of public opinion to another dimension.
On the afternoon of July 7, Du Jun publicly criticized Li Bojie, calling him "the founder with the worst sense of contractual spirit I have ever worked with." Li Bojie responded that evening, and Du Jun added further clarification in the early hours of July 8, with the debate centered around the Metagent project.
The core of the dispute lies in post-investment responsibilities. Li Bojie founded the Web3+AI project Metagent in 2024, positioning it as a Token-driven no-code platform allowing users to create and tokenize AI agents, combining AI Agents with blockchain tokenomics. In February 2024, ABCDE Capital participated in the investment, with a total agreement amount of $1.5 million. The first tranche of $500,000 was received, with the subsequent $1 million being conditional disbursements.
Du Jun stated that the demo presented by the team in June 2024 was of extremely poor quality, the project's social media had only posted a dozen tweets, and progress was far behind expectations. Starting July 2024, Li Bojie stopped responding to investor inquiries, deleted his Telegram account, left group chats, and shifted communication to co-founder Zhuang Siyuan. Subsequently, the investors repeatedly requested complete financial statements but never received adequate responses. Du Jun stated that project failure is acceptable, but taking the money and running is not.
Li Bojie later responded that only $500,000 of the investment was received, yet company equity was recorded based on the $1.5 million share. The lack of funding led him and his co-founder to voluntarily reduce their salaries, and both recruitment and R&D were hampered. In October 2024, due to family reasons preventing him from leaving mainland China and believing the Web3 project carried compliance risks, he resigned from Metagent with board approval. He claimed to have fulfilled periodic disclosure duties until his resignation and that subsequent projects also avoided Web3 and AI infrastructure fields as per the agreement.
Former ABCDE researcher HarryM posted that during communications in October 2024, the team still presented a crude demo but were most concerned about when the remaining $1 million would arrive, even asking if they could issue a Meme coin. Over nearly a year, they consistently dismissed investor resources and suggestions.
ArkStream Capital partner Ye Su also publicly stated that Li Bojie had approached their firm during fundraising. Initially interested due to the project's promising background, during due diligence they found Li Bojie intentionally blurred the lines between firms that had already invested and those that had only expressed interest. Moreover, the contract terms he sent were very amateurish, and the team's attitude towards the token vesting schedule was inconsistent, sometimes saying "we can decide later" and other times changing to "we can set one now." Consequently, the firm decided to abandon the investment.
Metagent was selected as a promising project in the BNB Chain Hackvolution hackathon in September 2023, receiving a $2,000 prize. In June 2024, it won an award in the Decentralized AGI track of the BeWater AI Crypto hackathon.
Its last social media tweet was on June 15, 2024, with no updates for over two years since, indicating the project is effectively stagnant.
With Metagent fading away without results, Li Bojie turned to a new project, Pine AI. Founded in late 2024, its predecessor was Logenic AI. It is a consumer-facing autonomous AI agent platform. Users submit task descriptions, and the AI agent can complete digital chores like making phone calls, negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions, and requesting refunds on their behalf. The platform emphasizes privacy protection and has passed compliance certifications.
According to public information on the project's official website, Pine AI currently has over 150,000 users, a 93% negotiation success rate, and has cumulatively saved users over $3 million. It completed a $25 million Series A funding round in December 2025. Li Bojie participated as an advisor in June 2024 and formally assumed the role of Chief Scientist in February 2025. He recently left the company due to a shift in research interest towards foundational models. He clarified that he is not the founder of Pine AI and his departure was purely due to adjusting research interests.
