X ACADEMY is a project I founded in 2016, originally under the name TechX Summit.

It is an annual 14-day festival of learning and creation that brings together over 200 undergraduate teaching assistants from the world's top universities and more than 400 explorers from all over to engage in intensive academic exploration and bring tech innovation projects to life from zero to one.

Today, X ACADEMY is China's most influential youth science and technology summer program, with the largest interdisciplinary community spanning universities worldwide.

When we first started, our idea was relatively simple - to create a really cool tech summer camp, giving more young people who are interested in technology but lack opportunities a chance to dive deep into a field and harness the power of technology to invent and create.

In 2014, I said that "technology gives people god-like powers". At the time, I had just started studying mechanical and electrical engineering in Germany. I would often spend gloomy rainy days alone in my dorm room, drinking, coding, tinkering with mechanics and industrial design. Although those creations seem a bit childish looking back, in that process of creating, I felt immense pleasure and a strange sense of empowerment. As I mastered various technologies, I truly felt how they amplified my individual abilities, which made me praise the power of technology.

From my perspective, TechX's original purpose was simply to let more of my peers experience that feeling of "technology granting god-like powers". I believe we achieved that, and later expanded it to more fields like design, biology, humanities, social sciences, etc. That's why we evolved from TechX to X ACADEMY.

Over the past 9 years, as our alumni base and reach have grown, we've discovered that the significance of TechX/X ACADEMY goes beyond that. It has become a mutual aid community, even spawning several tech "mafias". It has also become an incubator - to date, I've seen over 40 alumni projects and products launch, with some starting companies and securing funding.

So X ACADEMY hopes to let more people experience these "god-like powers", and through them, create products that exceed the imagination and bring us closer to a better future for humanity. We know this is very difficult to achieve alone or with a small group, which is why we hope to join forces with you in building that brighter future together.

As Peter Thiel once said, technological progress is the best way to reduce suffering in the world. Since the 1970s, technological advancement has largely stalled, leading to a toxic political climate and pervasive pessimism in the modern West. Pandemics, global economic collapse, climate change catastrophes, cyberattacks, and deglobalization have diminished people's hopes to the point of self-erasure. Technological breakthroughs may be the exact way to solve the various problems facing the world today. Those entrepreneurs, inventors and adventurers bringing revolutionary tools to boost human productivity and efficiency are also delivering boundless hope.