Cai Haoyu ist gerade dabei, Mitarbeiter zu rekrutieren.

Cai Haoyu's new company continues to recruit.

Recently, Anuttacon Studio posted a remote recruitment notice on the official account of the AI interactive game "Whispers From The Star" - the position is AI Trainer. The job content includes annotating and evaluating AI responses, creating high-quality training data, and aiming to build a creative team.

Two years ago, 36-year-old Cai Haoyu (Hugh Tsai) announced that he would step down from the leadership position of miHoYo. Subsequently, his new company, Anuttacon, emerged. It is an AGI startup project that has gathered many technical experts and started to recruit talents in the global AI circle.

This is just a microcosm. The global AI competition is in full swing, and the battle for AI talents has already begun.

Leaving miHoYo, Cai Haoyu is Recruiting Talents

Actually, since last September, the AI industry has received Cai Haoyu's "invitation for heroes".

At that time, Anuttacon, the new company founded by Cai Haoyu, began to recruit elites from the industry, focusing on recruiting pre-training and LLM talents. The office is located in Silicon Valley. An investor who often travels to Silicon Valley happened to talk to the project team. She told the investment community that Anuttacon initially focused on AI + games and later aimed at content platforms.

As Cai Haoyu believes, AlGC has completely revolutionized game development, and a new world is opening up.

On LinkedIn, Cai Haoyu said bluntly - in the future, only two types of people will make sense logically in game creation: one is the top 0.0001%, an elite team composed of the most insightful geniuses who can create something unprecedented; the other is 99% of amateur enthusiasts who can create games at will just to satisfy their own ideas.

Obviously, the new team he is building hopes to be the first type.

Here are some important figures in Anuttacon: Tong Xin, the former chief researcher and head of the Network Graphics Group at Microsoft Research Asia, is now the chief researcher at Anuttacon. During his time at Microsoft, he led several graphics patents and led the research team to invent and develop new graphics algorithms and systems for geometric modeling, facial expression capture, 3D printing, appearance modeling, and GPU virtualization.

Ye Lideng, one of the first batch of senior AI experts in Shanghai, the former head of distributed computing at miHoYo, is now responsible for the underlying architecture design of Anuttacon;

Wu Xiaojian, who was a senior research scientist at Microsoft and Meta successively, participated in the research of the open-source large model Llama 3.1, and now serves as the founding engineer and the head of the large model research team at Anuttacon. His research papers have been included in ICML, and he specializes in semantic coherence in multimodal interaction;

Wang Yuyang (Ray Wang), the former vice president of Bilibili and the youngest post - 90s executive at Bilibili;

Yunzhe Tao, who was an applied scientist at Amazon and participated in the reinforcement learning team, and later became a senior research scientist and technical supervisor at the Seattle R & D Center of ByteDance, etc.

In March this year, Anuttacon announced its first product, "Whispers From The Star". According to the official introduction, it is an immersive interactive narrative game with a science - fiction background that integrates a large language model. At that time, the Anuttacon team had about 50 members, and it is reported that half of them came from the miHoYo team.

After the open demo trial, Cai Haoyu specifically updated his LinkedIn profile - his position is AI Soulcaster, that is, the "AI Soul Grand Master" of the company.

For the newly recruited "AI Trainer" for "Whispers From The Star", the information shows that the hourly salary for this position is $20 - $30 (about 140 - 210 RMB).

Remember that when Anuttacon was just established, it mainly recruited employees in the San Francisco Bay Area and had an office in Santa Clara, USA. A person familiar with the company introduced that the initial office was set up in Santa Clara to take advantage of the innovative atmosphere and cutting - edge technology resources in Silicon Valley, promote the in - depth application and innovative development of AGI technology in the game field, and thus better attract global AI technology talents.

Now, one year has passed. The investment community has learned that Anuttacon is vigorously recruiting talents in LLM, multimodal, infra, engineering development, etc., based in the United States, Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai, etc., and the scope has expanded significantly. A recruitment post shows that for the voice/audio generation technicians recruited by Anuttacon, the starting requirement is a doctor who has published high - quality papers in top conferences and journals.

The Youngest Richest Man in Jinan

This is Cai Haoyu, the "tech geek", embarking on his second entrepreneurial journey.

Previously, he had already created a legend - miHoYo. Born in Jinan, Shandong in 1987, Cai Haoyu showed extraordinary talent in computer operation from a young age. At the age of 8, he won the second prize in the animation group of the national computer competition with his independently produced work "Alien Messenger", and later was elected as a "junior academician" of the Chinese Young Scientists Academy.

In 2005, he was recommended to study in the Department of Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he met several important partners in his life - Liu Wei, Luo Yuhao, etc., who would become his like - minded entrepreneurial partners in the future.

In early 2011, Cai Haoyu, who was about to graduate from graduate school, invited Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao, who also loved ACG, to officially establish miHoYo Studio in Room D32 of the Minhang Campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Their startup capital was a 100,000 - yuan interest - free loan from the Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Center. Their entrepreneurial direction was second - dimensional games, and at that time, they shouted a slogan: "Tech geeks can change the world."

The early days of miHoYo's entrepreneurship were extremely difficult. The startup capital was quickly used up, and they were rejected by many VCs. In a desperate situation, Song Tao from Sky Network invested 1 million yuan in this startup team, relieving the urgent need of these young people. Unexpectedly, it would bring a ten - thousand - fold return that would be recorded in history in the future.

After that, miHoYo's "Honkai Academy 2" became extremely popular; "Honkai 3" successfully broke through the circle and started to expand overseas. Until September 28, 2020, "Genshin Impact" was launched - as we all know, "Genshin Impact" has become a well - known "money - printing machine".

miHoYo has become a hidden giant in the Chinese Internet circle. The Hurun Rich List in 2024 shows that Cai Haoyu ranks third in the game circle with a net worth of 73 billion yuan and continues to be the richest man in Jinan.

Surprisingly, in September 2023, Cai Haoyu stepped down from the positions of legal representative and chairman of miHoYo, and Liu Wei took over. At that time, the company responded that "to meet the needs of the company's future development, Cai Haoyu, the founder of miHoYo, will invest more energy in the research and application of cutting - edge technologies, the development of new projects, and the connection of domestic and overseas R & D resources." Since then, Cai Haoyu has embarked on another journey.

Not long ago, Liu Wei openly talked about Cai Haoyu's transition. "miHoYo has become a large company, and to some extent, it will hinder the development of innovation, which is almost an inevitable thing for all large companies." Therefore, Cai Haoyu put down the daily affairs of miHoYo to pursue the vast expanse of cutting - edge technologies.

The War for AI Talents

In the AI battlefield, top - level talents are scarce resources.

When talking about Anuttacon's recruitment, an investor who often travels to Silicon Valley once told the investment community that in the past one or two years, many new Internet tycoons personally sat in the Bay Area and intensively met with technical personnel working in large Silicon Valley companies, especially OpenAI.

This has also given rise to a new intermediary service: Some consulting companies are specifically responsible for making introductions, and the fee for helping to arrange a meeting with a technical personnel ranges from $10,000 to $50,000.

The eagerness of large companies for talents is obvious. In May this year, Meta invested approximately $15 billion (about 107.8 billion RMB) in Scale AI, bringing its founder Alexandr Wang under its wing. To gain an edge, Meta also offered a $100 - million bonus to poach AI talents from other companies.

The cost of training a cutting - edge large AI model is astonishing, up to tens of millions of dollars or even hundreds of millions of dollars. In the total cost, the cost of investing top - level researchers in algorithm design, model tuning, and operation monitoring is often comparable to the cost of hardware such as GPUs.

As David Kann, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said, "A year ago, the mainstream narrative in AI was that huge computing power was needed to drive the industry's development. Now, the focus has shifted to talent advantages." In other words, talent is the top priority in the current AI arms race.

Previously, Fortune magazine published an article pointing out that the number of top - level AI experts globally is less than a thousand, and they are mainly concentrated in the core teams of technology companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta, revealing the severe reality of the scarcity of talents in the AI field. There is even a saying that there may be only a few hundred top - level talents who can truly drive the development of AI.

Therefore, whoever can grab these top - level talents will go further in this competition.

Surprisingly, in this AI talent war, young Chinese faces are the most sought - after. Huang Renxun once pointed out that 50% of global AI researchers are from China, which is currently the largest single talent group, far ahead of other countries.

After sorting out, it can be found that all these young AI talents graduated from famous universities. As an investor joked, the end of the Chinese AI competition may be a series of universities.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investment Community" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Yang Jiyun, published by 36Kr with authorization.