Embattled Chinese autonomous trucking company TuSimple has rebranded to CreateAI, focusing on video games and animation, the company announced Thursday.

The news comes as GM folded its Cruise robotaxi business this month, and the once-hot sector of self-driving startups has started to weed out stragglers. TuSimple, which straddled the U.S. and China markets, had its own challenges: concerns over vehicle safety, a $189 million settlement of a securities fraud lawsuit and delisting from the Nasdaq in February.

Now, just over two years after CEO Cheng Lu rejoined the company in the role after being pushed out, he expects the business can break even in 2026.

That’s thanks to a video game based on the hit martial arts novels by Jin Yong that’s slated to release an initial version that year, Cheng said. He anticipates “several hundred million” in revenue in 2027 when the full version is launched.

Before the delisting, TuSimple said it lost $500,000 in the first three quarters of 2023, and spent $164.4 million on research and development during that time.

Company co-founder Mo Chen has a “long history” with the Jin Yong family and started work in 2021 to develop an animated feature based on the stories, Cheng said.

The company claims its artificial intelligence capabilities in developing autonomous driving software give it a base from which to develop generative AI. That’s the next-level tech powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts.

Along with the CreateAI rebrand, the company debuted its first major AI model called Ruyi, an open-source model for visual work, available via the Hugging Face platform.

“It’s clear our shareholders see the value in this transformation and want to move forward in this direction,” Cheng said. “Our management team and Board of Directors have received overwhelming support from shareholders at the annual meeting.”

He said the company plans to increase headcount to around 500 next year, up from 300.

While still under the name TuSimple, the company in August announced a partnership with Shanghai Three Body Animation to develop the first animated feature film and video game based on the science fiction novel series “The Three-Body Problem.”

The company said at the time that it was launching a new business segment to develop generative AI applications for video games and animation.

CreateAI expects to lower the cost of top-tier, so-called triple A game production by 70% in the next five to six years, Cheng said. He declined to share whether the company was in talks with gaming giant Tencent.

When asked about the impact of U.S. restrictions, Cheng claimed there were no issues and said the company used a mix of China and non-China cloud computing providers.

The U.S. under the Biden administration has ramped up limits on Chinese businesses’ access to advanced semiconductors used to power generative AI.

This is a comparison of Wednesday’s Federal Open Market Committee statement with the one issued after the Fed’s previous policymaking meeting in November.

Text removed from the November statement is in red with a horizontal line through the middle.

Text appearing for the first time in the new statement is in red and underlined.

Black text appears in both statements.

Watch Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s press conference here.

WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve on Wednesday lowered its key interest rate by a quarter percentage point, the third consecutive reduction and one that came with a cautionary tone about additional reductions in coming years. 

In a move widely anticipated by markets, the Federal Open Market Committee cut its overnight borrowing rate to a target range of 4.25%-4.5%, back to the level where it was in December 2022 when rates were on the move higher. 

Though there was little intrigue over the decision itself, the main question had been over what the Fed would signal about its future intentions as inflation holds steadily above target and economic growth is fairly solid, conditions that don’t normally coincide with policy easing. 

Read what changed in the Fed statement.

In delivering the 25 basis point cut, the Fed indicated that it probably would only lower twice more in 2025, according to the closely watched “dot plot” matrix of individual members’ future rate expectations. The two cuts indicated slice in half the committee’s intentions when the plot was last updated in September. 

Assuming quarter-point increments, officials indicated two more cuts in 2026 and another in 2027. Over the longer term, the committee sees the “neutral” funds rate at 3%, 0.1 percentage point higher than the September update as the level has drifted gradually higher this year. 

“With today’s action, we have lowered our policy rate by a full percentage point from its peak, and our policy stance is now significantly less restrictive,” Chair Jerome Powell said at his post-meeting news conference. “We can therefore be more cautious as we consider further adjustments to our policy rate.”

“Today was a closer call but we decided it was the right call,” he added.

Stocks sold off following the Fed announcement while Treasury yields jumped. Futures pricing pared back the outlook for cuts in 2025 to one quarter point reduction, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch measure.

“We moved pretty quickly to get to here, and I think going forward obviously we’re moving slower,” Powell said.

For the second consecutive meeting, one FOMC member dissented: Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack wanted the Fed to maintain the previous rate. Governor Michelle Bowman voted no in November, the first time a governor voted against a rate decision since 2005. 

The fed funds rate sets what banks charge each other for overnight lending but also influences a variety of consumer debt such as auto loans, credit cards and mortgages. 

The post-meeting statement changed little except for a tweak regarding the “extent and timing” of further rate changes, a slight language change from the November meeting.