AI Special Series | You Hear About AI Every Day, But What Exactly Is It? This Article Explains It All Clearly (2026 Latest Edition

If you open your phone, scroll through short videos, or chat with friends, there's one new phrase you can't escape lately — "Have you raised a lobster yet?"

Here, "lobster" doesn't mean going to the market to buy seafood. It's referring to the explosively popular AI agent tool called OpenClaw in AI circles.

On March 6, 2026, thousands of people lined up outside Tencent Tower for free installations of the AI Lobster. Some flew in from Hong Kong, while others paid on Xianyu (a Chinese second-hand app) for doorstep installation services — costing anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred RMB, even more popular than hiring someone to set up a computer.

The future has arrived, but it's not evenly distributed. This time, what's uneven isn't wealth — it's cognition.

Behind this: A CEO with a fractured bone lying in bed used one AI Lobster to build an 8-person team in 14 days. They completed work that would traditionally take a team 2-3 weeks and cost 200,000 RMB — all for just 115 USD.

Efficiency improved by 750 times.

Today's article will thoroughly explain everything about AI in simple terms. No jargon. We'll cover three things clearly:

- What exactly is AI?

- How did it become what it is today?

- What should ordinary people do to not fall behind?

## 1. What Exactly Is AI?

Conclusion first: AI is not an "artificial brain." It's an extremely good tool at "finding patterns."

Think of it this way: You've seen thousands of cat photos from childhood to now. So when you see a furry blob from afar on the street, your first reaction is "Oh, a cat."

How do you know? You didn't solve a math problem. You've just seen so many cats before that your brain automatically extracted "cat features" and compared them.

AI does exactly that — except instead of thousands of images, it has seen hundreds of billions. Its ability to extract patterns far surpasses humans.

But it has no consciousness, no emotions, and no "own ideas." You can think of it as a super knowledgeable, tireless, but opinion-less super assistant.

## 2. How Did AI Become What It Is Today?

Humanity has spent a full 75 years on this. Here are the most critical milestones:

### 1950: Turing's Question

British mathematician Alan Turing asked: If a machine chats with you and you can't tell it's a machine versus a human, does it count as intelligent?

This is the famous "Turing Test."

### 1956: AI Is Officially "Born"

A group of scholars held a seminar at Dartmouth College and first formally proposed the term "Artificial Intelligence."

They were optimistically thinking they could build a machine as smart as humans in just one summer.

...They didn't. But this seminar established AI as an independent discipline.

### 1997: Deep Blue Beats Chess Champion

IBM's "Deep Blue" defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. This was the first time humans lost an "intellectual sport" to a machine. But Deep Blue relied on brute force (calculating 200 million moves per second), not true understanding of chess.

### 2006-2012: Deep Learning Explosion

Previously, AI was taught rules like "cats have pointed ears and round eyes." Deep learning let it look at millions of images and figure out "Oh, this is probably a cat" on its own.

In 2012, in a global image recognition competition, the error rate dropped sharply from 25% to 15%. From that day, AI's capabilities took off like a wild horse.

### 2017: Google Invents the "Universal Formula"

Google's team proposed the Transformer architecture. It allows AI to process text like humans "highlight key points" — for example, in "The kitten chased the mouse, it got tired," older AI wouldn't know what "it" refers to, but Transformer can automatically connect it to the kitten.

All later large models are built on this foundation.

### End of 2022: ChatGPT Brings AI to Everyone

OpenAI released ChatGPT. It reached over 100 million users in two months. It could converse, write articles, code, and poetry.

The most important part — it made you feel like a real person was chatting with you. From then on, even your grandma could talk to AI.

### 2024: Rise of Chinese Large Models

Chinese company DeepSeek released a model with 671 billion parameters. You can think of parameters as "brain cells" for AI. Its training cost was extremely low, but performance rivaled OpenAI's. China truly stepped onto the world stage in large models.

### 2025: Open-Source Wave Erupts

Meta, Google, ByteDance, Huawei... Tech giants open-sourced their large models. AI is no longer the "exclusive weapon" of a few companies. Any small company or individual can use the most advanced technology. The barrier was completely shattered.

## 3. 2026: "Everyone Raising Lobsters" Has Arrived!

Starting in early 2026, an open-source AI agent called OpenClaw went viral. Unlike ChatGPT, which answers one question at a time, it can take over your computer and work proactively for you 24/7.

Then everyone went crazy.

Cheetah Mobile CEO Fu Sheng broke his hip in a skiing accident during the Spring Festival and was bedridden. He talked to an AI Lobster named "Sanwan" —

- Day 1: The Lobster couldn't even access the company address book. Fu had to dictate executives' names and roles one by one via phone.

- Day 2: Sanwan figured it out and wrote scripts to pull the full 674-person address book.

- New Year's Eve: Sanwan sent personalized New Year greetings to 611 employees in 4 minutes — each one unique. Fu was watching the Spring Festival Gala while the Lobster worked.

- Day 5: Fu described his symptoms; Sanwan diagnosed it might be a hip dislocation and asked, "Should I contact Abby?" Abby was his human assistant, mentioned once casually five days earlier. Fu said that was the real "aha moment" — AI first showed the most valuable quality of a human assistant: anticipating needs and thinking ahead.

- End of Day 14: Sanwan evolved from a clueless AI into an 8-Agent team.

In 24 hours it built a full website: 59 HTML pages, 7,070 lines of code, 76 images, 38 pages of hand-drawn PPTs, and a complete English version. Fu didn't write a single line of code. Traditional teams would need 6 people for 2-3 weeks at 200,000 RMB cost. Sanwan did it for 115 USD in tokens. 750x difference.

On March 6, over a thousand people queued at Tencent Tower for free Lobster installs. Xiaomi announced mobile AI agent beta testing the same day. It only took two months to go from one person chatting with AI to all of China queuing to raise Lobsters.

## 4. What Is an "Agent"? Why Is It Better Than ChatGPT?

This is the concept you most need to understand in 2026.

### 1. ChatGPT Is a "Tool," Agents Are "Employees"

They are fundamentally different:

- ChatGPT (2022 mode): You ask a question, it answers. Then it waits for your next question. If you don't move, it doesn't move.

- Agent (2026 mode): You give it a goal. It breaks down steps, calls tools, completes the task, and solves problems on its own. You don't need to move — it's moving.

Example — Making an industry report:

With ChatGPT: You say "Write me a market analysis," it gives text. You still have to fetch data, make charts, and format it.

With an Agent: You say "Make me a March AI industry analysis report." It searches data, pulls numbers, creates charts, formats, and sends the final product. No hand-holding needed.

This is what Fu Sheng meant: "Using AI as a tool versus using a Lobster as an employee are two completely different things."

### 2. The Five Superpowers of Agents

- Memory — It doesn't forget when the chat closes. It remembers your preferences, experiences, and rules, getting smarter every day.

- Skills — Every mistake becomes a new permanent rule. A skill one Lobster learns can be shared to another in 1 second.

- 24/7 Operation — Give it a scheduled task and it runs automatically without you watching.

- Tool Calling — It can operate computers, send emails, search data, write code, make PPTs.

- Judgment — No longer passively waiting for instructions; it actively understands intent and makes decisions.

One sentence summary: ChatGPT is "you ask, it answers." An Agent is "you give the goal, it gets it done."!