A Wacky Comeback: From Zero to a Billion with an AI Startup

This novel tells the story of Chen Fan, a terrible student who unexpectedly launches an AI startup to save his failing hardware store and escape the fate of becoming a live-in son-in-law. With a 99-yuan open-source framework, he creates Tiedan, an AI that speaks with a Northeastern Chinese accent. Alongside a biology prodigy, a testing expert, and other partners, he adapts AI to the logic of the wet market, teaching Tiedan to write funny copy and haggle while also solving practical problems in warehousing, agriculture, and elder care. The team faces patent suppression, financing traps, AI safety crises, and other challenges, but gains a foothold through an open-source alliance and accessible technology. In the end, they take their business from a hardware store to a stock-market listing and bring AI into ordinary households, staging a down-to-earth, heart-pounding, and hilariously absurd entrepreneurial comeback.