Unexpected changes have occurred in the AI startup of Cai Haoyu from miHoYo.

Huh? Is Anuttacon, the AI company founded by miHoYo's Cai Haoyu, about to go under?

Recently, sharp-eyed netizens noticed that Cai Haoyu has updated his LinkedIn profile.

In his work experience section, the entry for Anuttacon ends in July this year, and the new identity that immediately follows is —

Independent Large Model and Agent Developer.

Compared with his previous work experience at Anuttacon, this title is far more understated. Back then, he gave himself the title of "AI Soulcaster".

Now he has put down his magic staff, taken off his robe, and after 15 years of twists and turns, he has returned to the identity of an independent developer.

Meanwhile, Anuttacon has frequently pressed the pause button recently, with its projects being shut down one after another, and team members leaving one after another...

Can the miracle of "Genshin Impact" be reproduced in the AI industry? Things have suddenly become much more interesting ~ (doge)

From "AI Soulcaster" to Independent Developer

Looking back at Cai Haoyu's three years of AI entrepreneurship, it is almost a non-stop cycle of creating new archives and restarting from scratch.

With the mindset of "tech nerds save the world", Cai Haoyu stepped down as chairman of miHoYo in 2023, devoting more energy to cutting-edge technology research.

The goal of founding Anuttacon was very clear:

To endow AI with emotion, performance capabilities, and interaction abilities closer to those of humans.

The first product launched to the public was the AI game "Whispers from the Star".

In the game, players need to communicate with Stella, an astrophysics student trapped on an alien planet, through text, voice and video calls, to help her escape to safety.

Different from traditional game NPCs, Stella does not have pre-written full lines. No matter players talk about movies, daily life, or even go off-topic suddenly, she can respond on the spot relying on AI.

The idea sounds good, but as a game, it still lacks sense of conflict and proper rhythm of goals. The model does feel quite fresh after chatting for a few words at first, but it becomes just so-so after a long conversation.

Therefore, after completing the technical verification, the team strategically terminated the development of subsequent versions of the game.

AnuNeko, an AI chat software launched at the end of last year, separated the AI character from the game independently.

Its default image is a black cat that can express emotions, tease users actively, and even refute users occasionally, especially it uses various miHoYo insider slang extremely skillfully.

However, this attempt did not last long either. Less than a year after its launch, AnuNeko announced permanent shutdown. The official reason stated that the team has a limited scale, and it needs to invest resources in other projects.

The third attempt is LPM 1.0.

It is a video character performance model with 17 billion parameters, which enables long-term real-time interaction of virtual characters, and generates various micro-expressions according to the user's tone.

It was widely praised as soon as it was launched, but unfortunately, there has been no follow-up progress since then.

From AI games, AI chat to video models, it can be said that Anuttacon has tried almost all AI virtual forms, but the Aha Moment has never been found.

Therefore, the skill tree was reset again. This time, all resources are shifted to the Agent direction.

Cai Haoyu Bets Big on Agent

The extreme enthusiasm of Cai Haoyu for Agent has been publicly revealed by David Liu, the co-founder of miHoYo long ago.

In his speech at Shanghai Jiao Tong University earlier this year, Liu Wei mentioned that Cai Haoyu not only learned large model technology from scratch and wrote PyTorch code himself, but also developed Agents by himself after intelligent agents such as OpenClaw became popular.

He only sleeps five or six hours a day, and he returns to the state when miHoYo was just founded, "like being injected with chicken blood".

It is reported that after using Agent products, Cai Haoyu quickly formed a judgment:

Agent is the future, and even the only standard for the virtual world, "Token is king".

To put it plainly, he no longer wants to only set character settings for AI roles, he wants AI to receive tasks, run processes, gain experience by itself, and finally become a truly actionable role in the virtual world.

The resource allocation of Anuttacon has also been greatly adjusted accordingly.

Previously, the computing power ratio of the three directions of large language model, video and audio was about 4:3:2. After adjustment, nearly 90% of the resources are concentrated in the LLM direction, and the large model team has shifted from researching game content generation to building system capabilities centered on Agent.

Once the route is narrowed, the team that was originally expanded horizontally will naturally change accordingly.

Public resumes show that Wu Xiaojian, who once served as the chief research scientist of Anuttacon, left the company in May and joined OpenAI. Tao Yunzhe, the founding research scientist, later joined Microsoft AI, and Zhu Minghao joined Tongyi Lab.

The video and audio teams have been downsized, and the R&D force of large models has gradually returned to China.

In the same period, Anuttacon also published a very interesting paper, in which the Agentopia framework can be understood as a large-scale Agent town.

The research team built three virtual worlds: campus, apartment and magic academy, put 100 Agents in each world, and let them live continuously for 10 simulated years.

All Agents need to make their own behavior decisions, and then researchers collect the interactive behaviors of Agents to train large models in reverse.

Interestingly, Anuttacon does not appear directly in the paper's affiliation list, but according to the public resumes of multiple authors, they have participated or are still participating in research at Anuttacon.

In other words, Anuttacon has temporarily faded out of public view, but the research route is still moving towards the Agent direction, and Cai Haoyu himself has once again stood at the forefront of the technical route.

Of course, this is still only a speculation based on public information.

At present, Anuttacon has not officially announced its closure, and Cai Haoyu's new identity may only represent a role adjustment after the company's restructuring.

But when all side quests are cleared and only the main line of "Large Model + Agent" is left, Cai Haoyu can finally devote all his energy to this direction.

Reference Links:

[1]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/m3fLAHpcZ1rUMbIILrJa2A

[2]https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugh-tsai-91691473/

[3]https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07513[4]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/q2A2yAlKcXPKkmZxUSJ7Kg[5]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Z1PpC9tJfSLA84gck92bOg

This article is from the WeChat official account "QbitAI", author: Focus on cutting-edge technology, published with authorization from 36Kr.