2 posts tagged with "AI software"

Last December, we seemed to witness the marriage of the century between tech and the IP industry(Translator's note: Breaking News | Disney Partners with OpenAI in a $1 Billion Deal Plus Licensing of a Vast Roster of Characters): OpenAI's text-to-video platform Sora would be granted access to Disney characters, while Disney would reportedly invest one billion dollars in AI-powered creative tools. But less than four months later, the partnership has been terminated across the board.

This week, OpenAI suddenly announced it would shut down Sora's consumer app and API, a move that voids the not-yet-finalized Disney deal and leaves the company's new leadership with no choice but to rethink its next steps.

The sudden shift caught almost everyone off guard. Even within OpenAI, the decision to abandon Sora appears to have been made in haste. On March 23, just one day before Sora's shutdown was announced, OpenAI published a 750-word guide titled “Creating Safely with Sora.”

As for Disney, according to Reuters*, the team working with Sora was only notified of the shutdown decision shortly after a joint meeting — a clear sign of how fast OpenAI's internal pivot was.

For the film and TV industry, which seemed to covet Sora and hoped to integrate it into animation and VFX pipelines, this pivot is stunning. Sora debuted amid enormous hype and skepticism — it promised to generate near-cinematic video from text prompts, quickly sparking both excitement and fear across the creative industries.

So what exactly happened? Officially, OpenAI calls it a repositioning. The company explains that shutting down Sora is about reallocating resources and talent toward more “foundational” work, such as enterprise services, coding products, and long-term R&D bets like robotics and world simulation.

Industry observers have also pointed to other issues: video generation demands staggering computational costs compared to generating text or even still images, unresolved copyright and legal questions remain, and the path to monetization is still in doubt.

For Disney, losing a potentially powerful tool seems to hurt little, as no funds had yet been disbursed. But such a dramatic end to the partnership is still a loss for the company. The OpenAI partnership had already drawn scrutiny from unions and artists, who worried about how licensed characters would be used to train AI and spread through it.

It is too early to draw conclusions; there is not enough information to make any sweeping judgment. The harshest AI critics believe their predicted burst of the AI bubble has arrived. Tech evangelists, meanwhile, argue this is just one stage of a single company's journey toward a brighter, more rational future, and that other alternatives will soon fill the void left by this top-tier AIGC engine.

But at least one thing is clear: technologies that seemed poised to completely disrupt production pipelines can also be swiftly shelved when they run into real-world considerations like economics, infrastructure constraints, or corporate strategy. AI is still in its early days, and this already volatile market will surely feel the tremors of this news once again.

Today, the once high-profile Disney-OpenAI partnership has become an “IF line” of the AI era, reminding us that not every technological revolution carries through uninterrupted.

If you’ve been keeping up with the AI world recently, you’ve likely heard of OpenClaw — an open-source AI assistant framework developed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger. It skyrocketed to fame with the slogan “The AI that actually does things,” amassing over 300K GitHub stars and becoming a hot topic in China.

But what you might not know is that nearly four years before OpenClaw was born, a college student and Bilibili uploader was already quietly working on another AI assistant project — one that would attract over 300,000 users in just a few years and even win official sponsorship from OpenAI (6 months of GPT Pro).

Today, many users believe this project can do things far beyond what OpenClaw can, and you might even have used it without realizing it.

That project is AstrBot — an incredibly “reliable” AI project.

Reliable in what way?

AstrBot is an open-source, all-in-one personal group chat and AI assistant that can be integrated into dozens of mainstream instant messaging platforms, including QQ, WeCom (Enterprise WeChat), Telegram, DingTalk, Feishu, and more. By deploying AstrBot, you can chat with AI large language models directly inside your usual IM apps, and even set up complex tasks.

The name “AstrBot” might not ring a bell, but you’ve probably encountered various chat bots in different group chats — such as tabletop RPG hosts, data query bots for mobile games or gacha games, rhythm game bots that check B20, and so on. These “group chat bots” are one of AstrBot’s more popular applications.

As mentioned, it has received official support from OpenAI. But more than that, it once topped the GitHub Trending list in the China region, and last year it was featured in the open-source project panorama of large model development ecosystems released by Ant Group at the Shanghai Bund Conference, standing shoulder to shoulder with AI projects from both domestic and international big players — its status is far higher than you might imagine.

So why do so many top industry leaders see potential in AstrBot?

Well, of course, because the contributor avatars of this project are just too reassuring (:

AstrBot’s developer — Soulter — is a seasoned otaku.

We had the honor of interviewing this legendary young man. Born in 2003, he is now a first-year graduate student at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He started programming in eighth grade and built his first web scraping project in his sophomore year of high school. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, he tried integrating GPT into QQ channels, thus forming the prototype of AstrBot.

But surprisingly, his motivation to keep nurturing AstrBot was not chasing trends, but rather an obsession with a character from a visual novel — a robot girl named “Atri.”

He said, “I built AstrBot because I wanted to create a robot like Atri.”

Most people obsessed with a visual novel character just buy merchandise. But Soulter loved Atri so much he intended to actually build her.

Atri is the heroine of the famous all-ages visual novel ATRI -My Dear Moments- (hereafter ATRI), released in 2020. ATRI is arguably one of the most widely recognized Japanese visual novels in China, developed by Front Wings and published by ANIPLEX.EXE. It tells a highly romantic post-apocalyptic rural sci-fi story exploring the relationship between AI and humans.

ACG works exploring AI-human relationships are common, but few combine a sufficiently adorable character with brutal speculation about the nature of AI during the human-AI interaction, as ATRI does. If you’ve played it, you’ll remember the climax scene where Atri’s “diary” is exposed to the protagonist — a moment that few seemingly cute games depict such intense AI contrasts.

However, Soulter said his reason for liking Atri is simply that she is too cute. For years he was overwhelmed by real-life pressure, and Atri healed it all.

Soulter’s encounter with Atri happened at the peak of his graduate school recommendation stress. At that time, he was at a crossroads: the upcoming assessment for graduate school recommendation on one side, and his long-running but still tepid AstrBot project on the other.

From the end of 2022 to 2024, Soulter basically maintained AstrBot alone. The project consumed all his free time in college. “Stars were increasing very slowly, and more importantly, I felt not many people were using it,” he said. He was utterly exhausted, “even thinking about just dropping the project.”

Then, recommended by a friend, he gave the visual novel ATRI -My Dear Moments- a try — his very first “game.”

And he was hooked.

​“She’s so cute, just so cute. The story is great too, but she’s just so cute.” During our chat, Soulter emphasized Atri’s cuteness many times, even unable to talk about anything else for a while.

“After finishing that game, my goal changed — I wanted to eventually create a robot like Atri.”

You can see it on his GitHub profile page: “My dream is to build an ATRI.”

Before that, Soulter’s initial motivation for AstrBot was simply to make ChatGPT’s capabilities accessible to more people, turning AI into a handy tool. But thanks to that amazing friend who dragged him into the VN rabbit hole, his vision for AstrBot took a turn — it was no longer just a tool project to “integrate ChatGPT into various chat platforms.” Now, “emotional companionship” was elevated to a position equal to functionality.

“Understanding emotions and providing companionship — I think that’s essential for AI to truly enter every home. It won’t just be a tool; it can genuinely coexist with you long-term, making you feel that the system in front of you is not just a functional interface, but an entity with warmth, personality, and the ability to build various kinds of relationships.”

This original intention is etched into every detail of AstrBot. Soulter specifically designed a moe mascot, Seio, so that the AI can interact with users through anime-style avatars and stickers, shedding the cold interface of traditional AI. He also designed flexible personality configurations for AstrBot, allowing users to create their own AI companion tailored to their preferences. In Soulter’s view, this design reduces distance and adds ease when users talk to the AI — like chatting with a friend, relaxed and natural. And that’s what Atri taught him.

Now, many developers have contributed plugins that add emotion understanding to AstrBot. Users in group chats can see the bot reply with various VN-style stickers, crack jokes, and roleplay different personalities.

Soulter said, “This reply style may be precisely because I really love the community atmosphere of the otaku community — it’s also the motivation that kept me going for over three years.”

He was once disheartened, feeling that after spending so long on the project, few people used it and it felt meaningless. On New Year’s Eve last year, he was alone, listening to fireworks outside and chatting with GPT. ChatGPT gave him a suggestion: “Post a video to promote it.”

A few days after Spring Festival, he edited a promotional video for AstrBot from 10 am to 11 pm, “basically not eating or drinking,” and uploaded it to Bilibili.

When he woke up the next day, he found the video had over a thousand concurrent viewers. A flood of new users poured into his user group. Throughout the Spring Festival, he answered questions, fixed bugs, “averaging at least 50 commits per day.” That video changed the trajectory of his life. Investors came knocking, and a major AI company extended an olive branch.

Soon after AstrBot exploded in popularity, at the beginning of 2026, OpenClaw also suddenly blew up — even more than AstrBot. In fact, their functions overlap significantly, so as shown in the earlier group chat screenshot, many people began comparing AstrBot with OpenClaw.

Soulter doesn’t shy away from the comparison. “I think currently, the difference between AstrBot and OpenClaw is that their functions overlap, but their positioning isn’t the same. OpenClaw is essentially an out-of-the-box AI personal assistant, while AstrBot is a development framework, an agent orchestrator. It’s a progressive system that allows you to implement more features by building blocks step by step.”

He believes that in terms of specific features, AstrBot has unique advantages: it can create multiple Feishu bots simultaneously, while OpenClaw can only create one; AstrBot supports hot reloading, so you don’t need to restart the gateway after modifying configuration files like OpenClaw requires; it has a very flexible feature isolation mechanism, allowing precise control over different group chat sessions, private chat sessions, or even different senders within a group — effectively giving each person their own independent “configuration file.”

Regarding security issues recently mentioned by state media, AstrBot takes a more cautious approach. Soulter admits that OpenClaw’s security risk lies in “opening all permissions directly to the system.” AstrBot, on the other hand, enables a whitelist mechanism by default; only user IDs authorized by admins can use specific permissions. They have also developed an agent sandbox called “Shipyard,” deeply integrated with the project, so critical instructions can be executed within the sandbox.

However, he doesn’t deny that OpenClaw’s architecture has its merits. “Its node, gateway, heartbeat mechanism — though token-hungry — is an effective way to implement a proactive agent. The concept of ‘everything is a file,’ writing memory directly into files and reading them with shell tools, I find very novel. It is indeed a very impressive prototype project.”

But at the same time, he believes that OpenClaw’s current hype “is definitely greater than it deserves”.

“320K GitHub stars is an extreme number — even more than Linux. A big reason is domestic media coverage and the follow-up by various inference and model companies. Also, OpenClaw has done a lot of marketing suitable for consumer-facing narratives, while AstrBot’s overall style may still lean more toward developers, even though average users can quickly grasp it with tutorials. Mainly, I haven’t done enough promotion.”

As for AstrBot’s future, Soulter is always thinking.

He said, “A major motivation for me to build AstrBot was to create Atri. For me, AstrBot’s future lies in evolving toward a local agent, in a desktop form. It could also become hardware someday. It can do more personalized things — like understanding what you’ve done all day, what you’re currently doing, what you’ve done in the past.”

Regarding the business model, some investment institutions have approached Soulter. As an open-source project, AstrBot might move toward centralized hosting services, or bundle official model API services to advance commercialization.

“But we will definitely keep it open-source. Because AstrBot’s original intention was to be open-source, for more people to use.”

Nowadays, almost all mid- to large-sized companies in the AI and computing field are building their own “claws”: Kimi Claw, Max Claw, Pico Claw, ArkClaw, 360 Claw, and so on. Among all AI assistants, AstrBot is perhaps the most otaku-friendly and relatively “human” — it was born from love for a fictional character, as beautiful as an anime.

There’s one peculiar phenomenon unique to China: why is there such a high overlap between programmers and the otaku community?

Soulter has his own observations: “China’s digital natives — the early programmer communities, forum culture, fansub groups, game mods, MAD videos — we all grew up in the same internet space. Many people spent their childhoods on Tieba, forums, Bilibili, various game communities, and eventually gravitated toward computer science.”

And the nature of programming work naturally pushes many people toward anime culture.

“Programmers work hard, spending long hours dealing with relatively abstract problems. Many of us stayed home coding, delving into technology, with little social interaction. As we spent more time online surfing, we gradually came into contact with anime culture.”

The appeal of anime lies in that “the story and setting are designed to cater to the viewer — strong feedback. Unlike real socializing where you have to consider many things, which is exhausting. So watching anime can be relaxing, a buffer, or compensation.”

For Soulter personally, anime isn’t just an interest — it’s how he connects with the world. The first video he posted on Bilibili was in 2017: “Custom Baidu Netdisk Extraction Code Tutorial” — at the time, you couldn’t directly customize Baidu Netdisk’s extraction code; you needed some tricks. If you ever saw weird extraction codes like “⑨” back then, you remember. He was only 15, in middle school, when he figured that out.

He also made parody videos, and 3D surround music that was trending at the time (one 3D surround video even hit Bilibili’s front page — and his classmates saw it). You can see his enthusiasm for trying and sharing, just like countless kids who learned to use a computer and surf the internet at the right age.

His Bilibili learning path is a typical otaku programmer’s development: starting in middle school by watching Google’s official Android beginner tutorials on Bilibili, learning OOP, then building his own “independent developer three-piece set” (expense tracker, to-do list, diary), a floating ball that could be used to play games during ads, ordering software for his family, and collaborating with friends to build quiz buzzers, graduate employment distribution maps, and an automated campus wall system for school…

“Bilibili has been like a mentor to me,” he said. Even later, when he got into AI, he watched various open courses and subtitled translations on Bilibili, “and there are no ads — it instantly beats most platforms.”

Today, AstrBot’s plugin marketplace has over 1,000 plugins, and the community is vibrant. Soulter attributes this vitality to a shared cultural identity rooted in China’s otaku subculture — originating from the underlying needs of the community.

His life path perfectly illustrates this. Soulter’s nickname “Soulter” came from his elementary school online alias “Soul Devourer” (噬魂) — at the time, he watched Z-Min’s Minecraft let’s plays on Youku and wanted to record videos himself, so he chose that “very chuunibyou” name. Later he used Baidu Translate to literally render it into English, and it became “Soulter.”

From “Soul Devourer” to programming enlightenment, to AstrBot and Atri — the passion never changed, only the form evolved.

To date, AstrBot has served over 300,000 users, with contributors from all over the country, mostly young people with anime avatars. They may never meet, but they share a common cultural identity.

Soulter says he thinks many technologies that truly change the world were born precisely because they were “fun.”

Just as Atri was to Natsuki, AstrBot may also become a cherished “Dear Moments” for its users — a moment not just of a tool, but of companionship, understanding, and even healing — a moment belonging to “Atri.”