The business model of China's AI community is shifting from selling paid courses to building community "factions," with five major communities—WaytoAGI, Datawhale, LangGPT, Founder Park, and Hugging Face—abandoning profiting from information asymmetry for free open-source resources, peer collaboration, and ecosystem monetization. This shift is driven by the inflation of AI content, which has driven the value of basic knowledge to zero, and practitioners' thirst for visibility and identity verification. However, the new ecosystem has spawned more dangerous counterfeits, with scammers repackaging courses as tiered "discipleship" programs to harvest fees. The core of a genuine faction lies in monetizing externally while keeping internal resources free. The real challenge is avoiding the collapse of charismatic authority and preventing "performative certification" from sliding into a culture of pure performance. AJ, founder of WaytoAGI, is jokingly called the "underground cult leader," and community events are named "AI Sparring Conferences." WaytoAGI has roughly 9 million users. The old course-selling model collapsed; in early 2024, Li Yizhou's "Everyone's AI Course" sold approximately 250,000 sets at a promotional price of 199 yuan in one year, generating revenue of about 50 million yuan (approximately $7.4 million), but its mini-program shut down due to watered-down content and lack of after-sales support.