When AI makes creation abundant, the scarce assets may no longer be technology and content—but community, taste, trust and participation.

Who still cares about Bilibili?

For many Western executives, the answer may be: I’ve never heard of it.

Bilibili is often described as China’s answer to YouTube—a video platform with strong roots in anime, gaming, youth culture and user-generated content.

That description misses something important. Bilibili was never particularly interested in becoming China’s YouTube, TikTok or GitHub. And in the age of AI, that may turn out to be one of its greatest strategic advantages.

The Bilibili paradox

At first glance, Bilibili looks like exactly the kind of platform that should be struggling in the current AI-driven internet.

Short-video platforms dominate attention. AI can generate increasingly sophisticated video and images. Content production is becoming dramatically cheaper. Every major internet platform is adding AI capabilities.

Yet Bilibili continues to grow.

The more interesting signal is not simply its user numbers. It is the depth of participation inside the community. Creators continue to publish. Users continue to comment. Long-form discussions are increasing. Many creators have remained active for years rather than months.

That matters because the internet is entering an era of extraordinary content abundance. And abundance changes the economics of attention.

When everyone can produce more content, content itself becomes less scarce. The scarce asset becomes knowing what is worth paying attention to.

That is where Bilibili becomes interesting.

AI is making creation cheap. That creates a new scarcity.

For most of the digital economy, creation has been expensive.

Writing software required programmers.

Producing video required editors and production teams.

Designing products required specialists.

Building a prototype required time and money.

Generative AI is changing this equation.

A developer can build a prototype in hours.

A designer can generate dozens of concepts before lunch.

A marketer can produce hundreds of creative variations.

A non-technical user can build something that previously required a development team.

This is enormously powerful.

But it creates a paradox:

When everyone can create, creation becomes less differentiated.

The bottleneck moves upstream.

The question is no longer:

Can you make something?

It becomes:

Do you know what is worth making?

And then:

Can you find people who care enough to test it, criticize it, improve it and share it?

This is where community becomes strategically important.

Bilibili’s real asset may not be content. It may be participation.

Bilibili’s AI activity provides an unusual example.

Its AI community does not consist only of professional researchers or software engineers. Students, designers, creators, hobbyists and people without formal technical backgrounds are experimenting with AI to build games, animations, tools and other products.

That distinction matters.

Traditional technology communities tend to optimize for technical depth.

Bilibili’s community optimizes for participation.

People watch someone experiment.

They comment.

They suggest a different prompt.

They challenge the result.

They reproduce the experiment.

Someone else takes the idea and modifies it.

Another person turns it into a product.

The process looks less like a traditional software-development pipeline and more like a continuously evolving public laboratory.

This creates something companies have historically spent enormous amounts of money trying to build:

a feedback loop between creators and users.

The community becomes part of the innovation system

Consider the traditional product-development model:

Research → Development → Launch → Marketing → Customer Feedback

The AI-enabled community model can look very different:

Observe → Experiment → Share → Receive Feedback → Iterate → Distribute

The second model is potentially much faster.

Not because the community has better technology.

Because the distance between an idea and its first real users becomes much shorter.

This is particularly powerful when AI reduces the cost of producing the first version.

One person can build a prototype.

The community can test it.

The creator can receive feedback immediately.

The next version can appear days—or sometimes hours—later.

In that environment, the community is no longer simply a marketing channel.

It becomes part of the product-development infrastructure.

That is a much more important idea than “Bilibili is becoming an AI platform.”

But there is a catch

Participation is not the same as business value.

A community can produce thousands of prototypes without producing many sustainable businesses.

AI is extraordinarily good at lowering the cost of starting.

It is much less capable of eliminating the cost of building.

A prototype may take hours.

Making it reliable across devices can take weeks.

A viral game may attract millions of views.

Building recurring revenue is another problem.

A clever AI application can win attention.

Enterprise customers still demand security, integration, reliability, compliance and support.

This is why Bilibili’s AI strategy should not be interpreted as a replacement for professional technology ecosystems.

It is doing something different.

Its potential strength is not pushing the frontier of foundational AI.

It is expanding the number of people who can participate in creating with AI.

That is a different form of technological diffusion.

And it may prove strategically important.

The deeper lesson for Western companies

This is where the Bilibili story becomes much bigger than Bilibili.

Most companies are currently asking:

How should we use AI?

That is already the wrong level of question.

A more strategic question is:

What becomes scarce in our industry when AI makes creation abundant?

For some companies, it may be trust.

For others, distribution.

For others, proprietary customer relationships, domain expertise or community.

And this leads to four questions every executive should consider.

1. Do you have an audience—or a community?

An audience consumes.

A community participates.

The distinction becomes increasingly important when AI makes content cheap.

If your customers only read what you publish, AI can potentially reproduce much of your content advantage.

If your customers contribute knowledge, feedback, experience and reputation to your ecosystem, the advantage becomes much harder to replicate.

2. Can customers help you build the next product?

The most valuable customer relationship may no longer be:

company → product → customer

It may become:

company ↔ community ↔ product

The community becomes part of the innovation process.

3. What is your company’s “taste”?

As AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous, expertise alone may not be enough.

Companies need a recognizable point of view.

What do you believe?

What do you reject?

What standards do you apply?

What problems do you consider important?

AI can generate alternatives.

It cannot automatically give a company a distinctive institutional point of view that customers trust.

4. Are you building trust infrastructure—or just producing content?

This may be the most important question.

In the old internet, visibility was largely about being found.

In the AI internet, visibility increasingly depends on being understood, represented and trusted by the systems that mediate information.

That requires more than publishing.

It requires a persistent body of evidence, expertise, relationships, references and community participation around the company.

In other words:

The competitive asset is shifting from content production to trusted knowledge networks.

Bilibili may be showing us an early version of this future

Bilibili may never become China’s GitHub.

It does not need to.

Its strategic opportunity may lie somewhere else: connecting entertainment, learning, experimentation, creators, users and emerging technology inside a community with unusually high participation.

AI gives ordinary people increasingly powerful creative tools.

Bilibili gives them something equally important:

people to create with, respond to and learn from.

That combination is difficult to reproduce simply by adding an AI feature to a conventional platform.

And there is a broader lesson here for business leaders.

For decades, companies competed by accumulating technology, capital, distribution and intellectual property.

AI is beginning to commoditize parts of all four.

The next competitive advantage may increasingly come from something harder to manufacture:

a community that trusts you enough to participate in your future.

That is why the question is not really:

“Who still cares about Bilibili?”

The more interesting question is:

In a world where AI makes almost everyone capable of creating, who will build the communities that decide what is worth creating?

That may be where the next generation of competitive advantage begins.