As we stand on the precipice of the AI era, the question isn't if NAS (Network Attached Storage) will experience its boom but when. The short-term forecast is clear: content creators are set to become the vanguard of NAS adoption.

A research report by iResearch unveils the current state of content creators in China. As of 2022, across six major content platforms, including TikTok, Kuaishou, and Bilibili, creators with over ten thousand followers exceeded 13 million, with a staggering 327% growth rate over three years for those with a following in the hundreds of thousands.

Among them, about 15% of professional creators who spend over 20 hours per week and have more than 10,000 followers are likely to adopt NAS as a productivity tool, showing a strong willingness to pay. According to user interviews by Peakview Capital, these creators are willing to spend over $2,000 on a single product.

A Bilibili content creator with 10,000 followers remarked, "We shoot in 4K, and one video is 100GB. Hard drive storage is just too limited to use, and local files can't be collaborated on, nor can they be transferred at sufficient speeds."

A typical scenario involves a creative team needing to discuss and work on the same material in real-time. While face-to-face discussions are essential, the ability to see each other's edits in real-time is also crucial, making NAS more than just a storage solution but a collaborative tool.

The demand for NAS is even greater among small studios and advertising agencies. One case in point is an advertising company with over 1000 hard drives, totaling more than 2000TB of accumulated materials. Managing these materials has become a significant headache for the CEO.

Firstly, there's the issue of finding specific materials among 1000 hard drives, which, while not an impossible task, is certainly daunting. Employee turnover and the subsequent knowledge transfer can be overwhelming for new staff.

Secondly, the slow transfer speeds of public clouds are a significant drawback. Even with multiple Baidu Netdisk SVIP accounts, the company still struggles to meet the transfer needs for large video materials.

Lastly, there are security concerns. Some clients have specific requirements that preclude their materials from being stored on public clouds.

These pain points of users and industries present opportunities for consumer-grade NAS products in the current phase.

From a more long-term perspective, the enhancement of open-source model capabilities will greatly facilitate the local deployment of AI. Typically, models with a large number of parameters like ChatGPT are deployed in the cloud. In contrast, smaller models can be deployed locally, processing simpler, more personalized, and more private tasks at the terminal closest to the user, which is also one of the future directions of AI development.

The most important aspect of AI's local deployment is the fitting of AI with private data to deliver more personalized value, which is the goal that personal and home Agents aspire to achieve. In this process, NAS naturally becomes the main pioneer.

With the help of Agents, users can have the ability to automatically classify, deduplicate, and search for various files; analyze, summarize, and archive files automatically; and edit their text, video, and other materials according to their preferences and styles using AI.

In the era of large models, everyone will have their own Agent, which also means that every family and every individual will need to deploy a NAS. This is where the differentiated value of local large language models lies, and it is where the potential value of NAS shines.