His first foray into the AI sector ended in failure, Cai Haoyu, known as the "Father of Genshin Impact", has quietly completed his career transition.

Cai Haoyu, co-founder of miHoYo, has run into a small "hiccup" in his AI entrepreneurship journey.

Recently, an AI companion product named AnuNeko officially announced its shutdown. AnuNeko is an AI companion product that offers two models, "Orange Cat" and "Exotic Short hair", and provides interactive communication and personalized services.

AnuNeko is developed by Anuttacon, a company founded by Cai Haoyu, and was officially launched at the end of 2025. It has been announced to cease operation in less than a year. The company stated that the reason for shutting down the application is that the team is small in size, and it will shift resources to other fields.

Behind the shutdown of AnuNeko, Cai Haoyu's AI entrepreneurship is in a transition period.

Cai Haoyu, 39 years old this year, is a well-known figure in the global game industry. Cai Haoyu graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. After obtaining his master's degree, he started a business with his classmates Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao, and founded the well-known game company miHoYo. After its establishment, miHoYo has launched multiple hit games such as "Honkai Gakuen" and "Genshin Impact", and has now become one of the most well-known game companies in China.

But in 2022, Cai Haoyu fell into confusion. Public information shows that in this year, Project SH, a 2D open world shooting game led by Cai Haoyu, was announced to be suspended. In the same year, the debut of ChatGPT made the whole world aware of the potential of generative AI.

In order to explore the boundaries of AI interaction technology, Cai Haoyu stepped down as chairman of miHoYo in 2023, and founded an AI company named Anuttacon in the same year.

Anuttacon positions itself as an independent research laboratory exploring human-centric general intelligence, where users can experience this intelligence firsthand in every real-time interaction: it can achieve seamless understanding and expression through text, voice, image and more media forms.

This concept echoes Cai Haoyu's past vision. Cai Haoyu once said, "to build a virtual world that one billion people are willing to live in by 2030".

Public information shows that after the establishment of Anuttacon, it has introduced many well-known researchers in the AI field, including Tong Xin, former principal researcher of Microsoft Research Asia, Wu Xiaojian, former senior research scientist of Microsoft and Meta, etc.

Led by Cai Haoyu, the team quickly delivered a number of R&D achievements. In August 2025, the AI narrative game "Whispers from the Star" was launched on the STEAM game platform; in December of the same year, AnuNeko went online. In April 2026, Anuttacon launched the video generation model LPM 1.0, which focuses on character performance generation capability, and can generate character videos that can speak, listen, respond in real time and maintain identity in long-term interactions.

However, with the emergence of AI Agent represented by Lobster, traditional AI applications have begun to show their limitations. It is probably for this reason that Cai Haoyu has begun to set his sights on AI Agent.

In a speech at Shanghai Jiao Tong University this April, Liu Wei mentioned that as AI Agent has been extremely popular recently, Cai Haoyu himself will develop some Agents from scratch, sleeping only five or six hours a day, but he is as energetic as if he had been injected with stimulants.

After that, the R&D progress of Anuttacon began to slow down. In addition to the official announcement of AnuNeko's shutdown, the game "Whispers from the Star" developed by the company is no longer updated, the server queuing problem is serious, and the positive rating in the past 30 days has dropped to 35%. In addition, no new progress of the LPM 1.0 model has been announced.

Recently, Cai Haoyu also updated his work experience on LinkedIn: since July 2026, Cai Haoyu has become an Independent LLM + Agent Developer, and his work location has been moved from California, the United States to Singapore.

Some market sources said that as early as the end of 2025, Cai Haoyu had gradually withdrawn from the specific R&D work of Anuttacon's audio and video teams, and devoted more energy to the direction of large language models and AI agents.

miHoYo's AI Exploration Journey

While Cai Haoyu is exploring the cutting-edge direction of AI applications, the game company he founded, miHoYo, is also actively embracing AI.

Founded in 2012, miHoYo has launched a number of game products including Honkai Impact 2, Honkai Impact 3, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero since its establishment. According to data from the third-party platform Sensor Tower, in the 2025 global revenue ranking of Chinese mobile game publishers, miHoYo ranks 5th, second only to giants such as Tencent, Century Huateng, Diandian Interactive, and NetEase.

In 2017, miHoYo submitted a listing application to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but failed to get listed in the end. According to the company's prospectus, Cai Haoyu is the actual controller of the company. At present, Cai Haoyu is still the largest shareholder of miHoYo, holding 41% of the shares of the company.

With the development of AI technology, many game companies are trying to integrate the technology into product R&D, and miHoYo is also exploring the application of AI in its game business.

As early as 2018, miHoYo established the AI and metaverse R&D department "Anti-Entropy Research Department", and launched the R&D of game-specific large models. In 2020, miHoYo launched the virtual digital human "YoYo Lumi", which attracted a lot of attention.

With the advancement of AI large model technology, miHoYo has also begun to apply corresponding technologies to its games. Recently, miHoYo has integrated a "Pom-Pom AI Assistant" with AI text dialogue capability into its game "Honkai: Star Rail", which can carry out real-time AI dialogue with players.

In May this year, Liu Wei also said at an event in Beijing that the company will invest up to 100 billion yuan in 3 years to deeply develop AI, and even if it does not succeed, he will accept it, "just like setting off a big firework".

miHoYo's next-generation game "Varsapura" is considered to be a new generation product with a large number of AI elements. Public information shows that "Varsapura" is the restart of the previously suspended "Project SH" of Cai Haoyu. This product will be a narrative-focused, realistic-style UE5 open world city game.

According to miHoYo's official website, the job requirements for the released recruitment positions of "Varsapura" also include clauses such as "promote the implementation and optimization of AI systems in actual projects" and "explore and realize AI-native gameplay". This may mean that "Varsapura" will embed AI more deeply into the game to explore more unique gameplay.

In 2024, Cai Haoyu once posted a "radical view" on social media, saying that AIGC has completely subverted game development. In the future, only two types of people make logical sense in creating games: one is the top 0.0001% of people, an elite team composed of the most insightful geniuses, who create unprecedented things. The other is 99% of amateurs, who can create games freely just to satisfy their own ideas.

Nowadays, AI has penetrated into the whole chain of the game industry, including game development and gameplay. What kind of subversion and change AI will bring to the game industry in the future still needs the market to give the answer.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Damo Finance" (ID: damofinance), the author is Damo Finance, and it is republished with authorization from 36Kr.