Why the Studio Behind Genshin Impact Wants to Build a Top-Tier LLM

The developer of Genshin Impact wants to be an AI company too. According to discussion on LINUX DO, miHoYo's founder told students at a Shanghai Jiao Tong University recruitment talk that the company's large language model aims to reach China's top tier within the next one to three years. The thread drew 4,500 views and 119 replies — and the most interesting part wasn't the ambition, but where the community thinks miHoYo will aim its model.

Not code — characters

The consensus prediction: miHoYo won't chase the code-generation crown. Instead, it'll go after chat and lifestyle use cases, in the vein of DeepSeek's consumer success. The reasoning is simple — a game studio's unfair advantage isn't GPUs or papers, it's characters people already love.

Players have been impressed by AI-driven NPCs in the studio's recent games: characters that remember conversations, react with personality, and feel less like quest dispensers and more like inhabitants. For a company whose core competency is making millions of players emotionally attached to fictional people, a language model isn't a pivot. It's the missing technology for the thing they already do.

The "living character" thesis

Think about what a top-tier game studio brings to the LLM race that a lab doesn't:

• Character writing at scale. miHoYo employs armies of writers who craft distinct voices for dozens of characters. That's effectively the world's largest RLHF dataset for personality.
• Emotional attachment as distribution. People don't just use these characters; they cosplay them, write fanfiction about them, spend money on them. An AI companion from this pipeline starts with a fanbase.
• Multimodal by necessity. Games already combine text, voice, animation, and real-time interaction. A "living" game character is the most demanding possible demo of an embodied AI.

Western observers tend to frame the AI race as labs competing on reasoning benchmarks. miHoYo's rumored bet suggests a different finish line: whoever makes AI feel alive first wins the consumer market. It's the same intuition driving the West's fascination with AI companions — except here it's backed by a studio that already monetizes fictional relationships better than anyone on earth.

The community's reaction says a lot

The forum thread itself was revealing. Alongside serious analysis, players cracked gacha jokes — "top up 648 first," referencing the game's most infamous premium currency bundle. The humor carries a real insight: miHoYo's players already have a spending relationship with AI-adjacent characters. If anyone can convert "I love this character" into "I talk to this character every day," it's them.

Skeptics in the thread noted the timeline vagueness (one to three years is an eternity in AI) and that recruiting-talk promises are cheap. Fair. But directionally, the move makes sense: the next wave of consumer AI probably isn't a smarter chatbot — it's characters worth caring about. Game studios have been rehearsing for that future for decades.

For a lighter look at how this same community evaluates AI, see the pelican test — their unofficial benchmark involving a 3D pelican on a bicycle.