Controversy Surrounding Huawei's Prodigy Li Bojie and His DeepSeek Interview Experience Amid Web3 Investor Backlash

From Huawei's prodigy to a controversial figure in Web3, the financing saga of Li Bojie’s Metagent.

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

On July 6, former Huawei "prodigy" Li Bojie drew attention for publicly criticizing his interview experience with DeepSeek. However, the larger controversy emerged from his public dispute with his former investment firm, ABCDE Capital, regarding his startup project, Metagent.

Li Bojie detailed his experience at the DeepSeek interview on social media. According to him, after passing the written test, he was left waiting for nearly half a month, and only after repeated inquiries did he finally get an interview scheduled. The interview required him to complete two rounds of coding tests, during which the interviewer questioned him about his responses, suggesting they were "research questions" and repeatedly probing his understanding of engineering challenges.

During the coding segment, the interviewer noticed him frequently looking at the left screen and questioned whether he was plagiarizing, stating that the interview could not continue unless he proved his innocence. Li Bojie claimed this accusation made him feel "seriously offended," and he decided to end the interview on the spot. Subsequently, he called for the matter to be spread on public platforms.

Li Bojie received the Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2017

According to publicly available information from Baidu Baike, Li Bojie was born in 1992 and graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China’s gifted program with a PhD in Computer Science. During his doctoral studies, he published papers at top conferences such as SOSP and SIGCOMM. In 2017, he received the Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2019, he was selected as one of only eight individuals for Huawei's first "prodigy" program, joining the 2012 lab as a P20-level employee, and served as an assistant scientist to deputy chief expert, participating in the optimization of Ascend AI chips and large-scale model distributed training. In July 2023, he left Huawei to establish Logenic AI (now Pine AI).

The day after Li Bojie publicly criticized his interview experience, Du Jun, co-founder of Web3 investment firm ABCDE, shifted the focus of public opinion to another dimension.

On the afternoon of July 7, Du Jun publicly accused Li Bojie of being "the founder with the least sense of contract spirit he has ever worked with." That evening, Li Bojie responded, and on the morning of the 8th, Du Jun provided further clarification, leading to a debate between the two regarding the Metagent project.

The core of the controversy lies in post-investment responsibilities. Li Bojie founded the Web3+AI project Metagent in 2024, positioning it as a token-driven no-code platform that allows users to create and tokenize AI agents, integrating AI agents with blockchain token economics. In February 2024, ABCDE Capital invested a total of $1.5 million, with an initial payment of $500,000 and a subsequent $1 million conditional disbursement.

Du Jun claimed that the demo presented by the team in June 2024 was of extremely poor quality, and the project's social media had only posted a dozen tweets, with progress far below expectations. Starting in July 2024, Li Bojie stopped responding to investor inquiries, canceled his Telegram account, and left the group, with co-founder Zhuang Siyuan taking over communications. The investors repeatedly requested complete financial statements but received insufficient responses. Du Jun stated he could accept project failure but could not accept the money being taken and running.

Li Bojie later responded that only $500,000 of the investment had been received, while the company's equity was recorded at the $1.5 million share, and the lack of funds led him and his co-founder to voluntarily reduce their salaries, hindering recruitment and R&D. In October 2024, due to family reasons, he could not leave the mainland and believed there were compliance risks in the Web3 project, so he resigned from Metagent with board approval. He stated that he had always fulfilled his disclosure responsibilities on time before leaving, and the subsequent project also avoided Web3 and AI infrastructure areas as per the agreement.

HarryM, a former researcher at ABCDE, stated in a post that during communications in October 2024, the team still presented a rough demo but was primarily concerned about when the remaining $1 million would be received, even asking if they could issue a meme coin, showing a dismissive attitude towards investor resources and advice over the past year.

Ye Su, a partner at ArkStream Capital, also publicly stated that Li Bojie had contacted their firm during the financing period, and the team initially expressed interest due to the project's good background. However, during the due diligence phase, they found that Li Bojie intended to confuse invested institutions with those that had only expressed interest, and the contract terms he sent were very amateurish. The team was inconsistent regarding the token unlocking plan, sometimes saying "we'll decide later" and sometimes saying "we can set one now," leading the firm to decide against investing.

Metagent was selected as a potential project in the BNB Chain Hackvolution hackathon in September 2023, receiving a $2,000 reward; in June 2024, it won an award in the decentralized AGI track at the BeWater AI Crypto hackathon.

Its last tweet on social media was on June 15, 2024, and it has not been updated for over two years, effectively putting the project on hold.

As Metagent comes to an end, Li Bojie turns to his new project, Pine AI. This project was founded at the end of 2024 and is the successor to Logenic AI, serving as a consumer-facing autonomous AI agent platform. Users can submit task descriptions, and the AI agent can handle digital chores such as making phone calls, negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions, and requesting refunds, emphasizing privacy protection and compliance certification.

According to information on the project’s official website, Pine AI currently has over 150,000 users, with a negotiation success rate of 93%, saving users over $3 million cumulatively. In December 2025, it completed a $25 million Series A financing round. Li Bojie participated as an advisor in June 2024 and officially became the chief scientist in February 2025. Recently, he left due to a shift in research interests towards foundational models, clarifying that he is not the founder of Pine AI and that his departure was purely a matter of adjusting his research interests.

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