On September 11, at the opening main forum of the 2025 Inclusion · Bund Conference, Zhang Hongjiang, Partner at Source Code Capital and Academician of the National Academy of Engineering (Foreign Member), shared his insights on large language models, AI agents, and the agent economy. He stated that the "scaling law" of large models remains effective, and the interaction between agents and the transformation of economic structures will profoundly reshape society.
The scaling law is regarded as the first principle for performance improvement in large models, meaning the higher the parameters of a large model, the better its performance. Although the industry believes that the scaling law for pre-training models is gradually slowing down, Zhang Hongjiang specifically pointed out that the emergence of reasoning models has created a new development curve - "reasoning scaling." He said that the demand for computation in aspects such as context and memory will continue to drive scaling up.
Zhang Hongjiang also noted that "LLM flation" will further strengthen the scaling law. The price per token for large models has rapidly declined over the past three years, and with the continuous improvement of large model performance, the cost of use will keep decreasing.
In terms of AI industrialization, Zhang Hongjiang pointed out that AI is driving massive expansion of infrastructure. He listed projects such as OpenAI's Stargate and Musk's Colossus, where the power consumption of 1 million GPUs is equivalent to one-eighth of Beijing's electricity consumption. It is estimated that AI-related capital expenditures by major U.S. tech companies in 2025 will exceed 300 billion dollars. The entire AI data center industry has experienced a large-scale construction boom in the past year. He said that the large-scale construction of the IDC industry will promote the power ecosystem and drive economic development, which is the core manifestation of "the scaling of AI industrialization."
Zhang Hongjiang summarized that humanity is entering the "agent swarm" era, which means a large number of agents interacting with each other, executing tasks, exchanging data, information, and even tasks. The interaction between humans and these agent swarms will constitute what is called the "agent economy." He stated that models and GPU computing power will become core assets for future organizations. "Enterprises need to expand computing power to make models stronger and data richer," he pointed out. He emphasized that agents will reshape enterprise processes, and the combination of "super individuals + agents" will bring significant structural changes.
On the morning of September 11, the 2025 Inclusion · Bund Conference, themed "Rebuilding Innovative Growth," opened in the Huangpu Expo Park in Shanghai. Since 2020, under the care of the Shanghai Municipal Government, and with the support of the Shanghai Local Financial Administration Bureau and the Huangpu District People's Government, the Inclusion · Bund Conference has been held for four consecutive years, becoming a high-level open dialogue platform between global finance, technology, and industries.
