Cai Miao's AI experiment has been suspended.

In the past week, one of the most widely discussed topics is that two Chinese mathematicians Deng Yu and Wang Hong won the Fields Medal. The "dimension barrier" between the two has also been accidentally broken: Wang Hong's social account avatar is Mitsumi Iwakura, the heroine of the animation *Skip and Loafer*, while Deng Yu's account uses a character from the animation *Saki*. All kinds of subculture avatars and online "aliases" they used in the past have also been dug up by netizens.

The protagonist of my article today is a technical guru in the subculture circle — Cai Haoyu, founder of miHoYo. From winning awards for computer animation as a teenager, to founding miHoYo with two college classmates, and then creating the *Honkai* series and *Genshin Impact*, Cai Haoyu has almost turned his passion for technology, games and subculture into a global game company valued at hundreds of billions of yuan.

After miHoYo became mature, Cai Haoyu chose to start a business again. Last December, AnuNeko, an AI chat tool with distinct personal style of Cai Haoyu, was officially launched. "Neko" means "cat" in Japanese, and Cai Haoyu has been used to adding "meow" to his words in online communication for many years.

Different from AI products on the market that emphasize efficiency and task execution, AnuNeko chooses to enter the market with the image of "cat girl", focusing on highly personalized, emotional companion-style conversations. It will generate different responses according to the user's mood and chat content, and present different personality characteristics in each conversation, so that the communication always retains a certain sense of novelty and unpredictability.

In less than half a year, this product will soon say goodbye to users. AnuNeko announced last week that it will be permanently shut down at 23:59 Pacific Standard Time on July 29 (14:59 Beijing Time on July 30). Regarding the reason for the shutdown, the team said that due to the small scale, after careful consideration, it decided to invest limited resources in other directions.

AnuNeko is more like an AI experiment conducted by Cai Haoyu. Looking back on the past two years, Cai Haoyu has been carrying out many attempts in the direction of AI, from chat applications, interactive games to character generation models. This entrepreneur who once created commercial miracles with subculture and games, after leaving the aura of past myths, in the AI wave, everything seems no longer to succeed so logically.

Right after the announcement of the product's discontinuation, Cai Haoyu updated his LinkedIn profile and added a new professional experience — "Independent LLM + Agent Developer", whose tenure started from July 2026, and the work location is shown as "Hybrid Work in Singapore".

It is reported that Cai Haoyu has gradually withdrawn from the specific R&D work of Anuttacon's audio and video team since the end of last year, focusing more on the direction of large language models, and recruiting talents on a large scale in China, introducing key members from leading model companies.

This also conforms to the trend of the industry. The model is still the most critical part, and the golden age of application entrepreneurship does not seem to have arrived. Even the richest man in Jinan can't hold on, which shows that AI application entrepreneurship is indeed not easy.

Cai Haoyu's AI Lab

AnuNeko is an experimental AI chat application developed by Anuttacon, a company founded by Cai Haoyu.

In 2023, Cai Haoyu announced that he would leave miHoYo. The next year, news came out that Cai Haoyu co-founded the AI company Anuttacon. Public information shows that Anuttacon is registered in Singapore, at the same address as miHoYo's overseas brand HoYoverse. The company mainly conducts business in Silicon Valley, the United States, and gathers a group of talents from the AI field. At that time, he also publicly stated that AIGC has completely changed game development. For ordinary game developers, he even suggested that they might consider switching careers.

The goal of Anuttacon is not just to develop a smarter large model, but to start from basic pre-training and try to build an "emotional large language model" — it not only has the understanding and reasoning capabilities of general large models, but also can identify human emotions and understand the emotional demands behind users.

Different from most AI products on the market that focus on efficiency improvement and task execution, AnuNeko is not in a hurry to help users write emails, organize materials or complete work, but focuses on the sense of companionship and personalized interaction. When opening the product, users will first see a black cat. AnuNeko currently has two built-in models — "Orange Cat" and "Exotic Shorthair", and users can choose different "companion objects". When they meet for the first time, it will emphasize that it has emotions and will also have some weird ideas. In subsequent communications, this "little cat" does not just cater to users, but expresses its own attitude, occasionally teases actively, and even refutes users.

In addition to AnuNeko, *Whispers from the Star*, an AI interactive work previously launched by Anuttacon, also presents another vision of this studio for the combination of AI and games.

In this work, the heroine is trapped in a crashed spaceship. Players need to interact with her through real-time conversations, help her find ways to open the hatch, explore the strange planet, and try to capture signals from other teammates. Different from traditional games where the plot advances according to a preset script, players can freely express and ask questions, and the AI character will respond according to the conversation content.

According to the vision of the Anuttacon team, when the relevant technology is mature enough, developers may only need to input some preconditions to automatically generate characters and endow them with corresponding behavior logic, interaction capabilities and personality traits. What players face will no longer be just game characters acting according to fixed lines, but AI agents that can understand the situation, respond in real time, and continuously participate in the development of the story.

However, this has also triggered discussions among some players: If the game experience mainly stays at "chatting with AI" and cannot really use AI to promote the evolution of the plot, is it just a "GPT cosplay (AI role-playing)"? Anuttacon internal staff once responded that *Whispers from the Star* is not a game with complete content and mature experience like *Genshin Impact*, but more like a "weather vane".

Up to now, *Whispers from the Star* has not continued to launch new versions.

The Subculture Prodigy

Cai Haoyu is probably one of the earliest prodigies in China's Internet industry who "broke the circle" with subculture.

In 1987, Cai Haoyu was born in Jinan, and he showed his interest and talent in computers, technology and digital content from an early age. At the age of 8, his independently produced animation work *Alien Messenger* won the second prize in the National Computer Animation Competition; at the age of 11, he was elected as one of the first batch of "Little Academicians" in the field of computer of the Chinese Young Scientists Academy, and the only one in the computer field; in 2005, he was admitted to the Department of Computer Science of Shanghai Jiao Tong University with his physics competition results, and then continued to pursue his master's degree in computer science.

miHoYo was his first venture. In 2012, Cai Haoyu, who was still pursuing his postgraduate degree, formed a three-person team with his classmates Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao to officially start their business. At that time, subculture games had not yet become a widely recognized independent track, but for Cai Haoyu, who was only in his twenties at that time, it was more like a way for him to observe reality, understand users and express himself. For a long time, the slogan used by miHoYo was "Otaku save the world".

In a public speech in 2014, Cai Haoyu once mentioned that there is a special trust and belief among subculture users. Some users will stay because of their interests, while others may be infected by this shared enthusiasm, take the initiative to understand, learn and enter this circle.

"When a group of us know some subculture knowledge, these users will feel embarrassed to say they don't know, they will go back to check, and then join the subculture camp. That's how we expand the subculture market," Cai Haoyu said at the time.

Since then, the virtual world built by miHoYo has also shown far greater user stickiness than traditional game products. A fan once launched an activity to celebrate the birthday of the character Raiden Mei on Baidu Tieba, which received more than 100,000 views in just 5 minutes; the miHoYo team also received "birthday gifts" such as chocolate and hairy crabs sent by players.

Over the past decade or so, many media and industry insiders have tried to summarize the successful methodology of miHoYo, but they have never found a set of answers that can be easily replicated. Technology, content, operation and globalization seem to be only part of miHoYo. The variable that is really difficult to quantify and most personal is probably Cai Haoyu himself. His understanding of the "open world", his almost harsh pursuit of details, and his distinct perfectionism have not only shaped miHoYo's products, but also made many players become fans of Cai Haoyu. Because he is used to adding "meow" in his public speeches, Cai Haoyu is affectionately called "Cai Miao" by players.

According to the *2025 Hurun China Rich List*, Cai Haoyu ranks 60th on the list with a wealth of 81 billion yuan. The *2025 Hurun Global Unicorn Index* released at the same time shows that miHoYo is valued at about 180 billion yuan, ranking 17th in the world.

High-frequency Trial and Error and Rapid Adjustment

After leaving miHoYo, Cai Haoyu's second venture has not been as smooth as the first one.

Judging from the current external results, several explorations of Anuttacon have not formed products that can continue to operate: *Whispers from the Star* has not been updated subsequently, AnuNeko was announced to be shut down less than a year after its launch, and the recently publicly released character video model LPM 1.0 has also been adjusted out of the core R&D direction of the team.

LPM 1.0 was released in April this year. Different from general video generation models that pursue more complex scenes and longer videos, LPM 1.0 focuses on "character performance" — allowing virtual characters to speak, listen and respond in real time, and present corresponding eye, expression and emotional changes according to the conversation. To this end, the team trained a Base LPM with 17 billion parameters, and distilled it into an Online LPM that supports low-latency streaming generation, trying to achieve real-time, infinite duration and identity-stable video generation.

However, according to the latest media reports, the R&D of LPM 1.0 has been stopped inside Anuttacon. The team began to re-adjust computing power and organizational resources, shift the R&D focus to large language models and Agent capabilities, and reduce investment in audio, video and other directions.

This high-frequency trial and error and rapid adjustment forms a certain continuity with Cai Haoyu's entrepreneurial style in the miHoYo era. From the early subculture indie games to the *Honkai* series, and then to open world products, the miHoYo team also experienced long-term trial and error, and accumulated technology, content, users and IP in successive product iterations until they created *Genshin Impact*.

But the environments in which the two ventures are located are completely different. Although subculture games were once a market that had not been fully developed, their technical boundaries were relatively clear. Developers can gradually improve products, accumulate content, and build user communities through continuous investment. The life cycle of a game is often calculated in years, and the team has enough time to polish gameplay, expand the worldview and precipitate IP.

AI follows a completely different rhythm. Model capabilities may iterate rapidly within a few months, and a seemingly leading technical route may quickly lose its advantages with the emergence of new models. Startups must not only judge user needs, but also continuously track changes in model capabilities, computing power costs and technical paradigms. In such an environment, before the product has completed commercial verification, the underlying technical route may have changed.

According to relevant reports, Anuttacon is currently shifting its R&D focus to models and Agent capabilities. Its large language model team mainly explored game content generation in the early stage, and now it is gradually shifting to the construction of system capabilities with Agent as the core.

However, whether it is AI-generated game content or Agent, they are all tracks with fierce competition and business models yet to be verified. Take Character.AI as an example, a company once regarded as one of the most promising AI character platforms, quickly accumulated a large number of users with highly personalized chat characters, and was once rumored to have a valuation of about 5 billion US dollars. But the user scale did not directly translate into corresponding commercial revenue. In 2024, Character.AI was sold to Google, and the relevant transaction was valued at about 2.5 billion US dollars, half less than the previously rumored market valuation of 5 billion US dollars.

It seems that Cai Haoyu is still in the process of experimental exploration on how to convert technology into real product demands.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Dongsi Shitiao Capital" (ID: DsstCapital), written by Wei Xianghui, and authorized for release by 36Kr.