Fangbo Tao (陶芳波)
Fangbo Tao is the founder of Mindverse (心识宇宙), working on artificial intelligence and digital selves. The transcript of the show renders his given name as 陶方波, a homophone variant; his public materials write it as 陶芳波.
Background and notable work
- Career: according to an event introduction page by Peking University’s Intelligent Computing and Sensing Lab, Dr. Fangbo Tao is a data mining and AI specialist who has done research and development at Microsoft Research (US), Facebook Research, NASA and the neural-symbolic lab of Alibaba DAMO Academy; the same page says that at Alibaba he led the building of what it calls the first commercial photonic cognitive computing system on the market.
- Mindverse (心识宇宙): the same page introduces him as founding Mindverse (Mindverse.ai) as founder and CEO in 2022, in a batch of the Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City overseas high-level talent innovation and entrepreneurship program; the company site describes its mission as “We Create AI as Your Digital Self”.
- Second Me: Mindverse’s open-source project mindverse/Second-Me (created in March 2025, Apache-2.0 license) is described as an open-source prototype for training your own AI self: a locally trained and hosted AI avatar that preserves your data and can join a decentralized network to connect with others.
Mentioned in the show
Tao does not appear in the episodes quoted on this page; the following is a host’s recollection. At the start of the Agent 是助理，还是数字分身？ (Is an agent an assistant, or a digital self?) chapter of Weekly #005 (Chinese transcript), after raising the question “Agent 到底是你的助理，还是你的数字分身” (is an agent ultimately your assistant, or your digital self?), Yang Pan says: “之前我们不是跟陶方波聊过这个话题吗？” (“haven’t we talked about this topic with Fangbo Tao before?”) (see that line); Orange then sums up that “这波大家的共识还是做助理” (this wave’s consensus is still to build assistants), and the hosts continue discussing Personal Agent directions in China and abroad.
Yang Pan is recalling an earlier conversation; the episode does not specify how that conversation took place. The topic matches his Mindverse and Second Me work on digital selves, but his actual views should be read from his own public statements.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Fangbo Tao?
The founder of Mindverse (心识宇宙); he previously did research and development at Microsoft Research (US), Facebook Research, NASA and Alibaba DAMO Academy’s neural-symbolic lab. See the PKU lab’s introduction page.
What is Second Me?
An open-source “AI self” framework released by Mindverse in 2025: you train and host an AI avatar with your own memories and context locally, and it can connect to others over a network. The code is on GitHub.