Embattled Chinese autonomous truck company TuSimple has rebranded to CreateAI, which focuses on video games and animation, the company announced Thursday.

The news comes as GM has announced its Cruise robotaxi business this monthand the once-hot sector of self-driving startups began to take off its legs. TuSimple, which spanned the US and China markets, had its own challenges: vehicle safety concernsa payment of $189 million of securities fraud case and delisting from Nasdaq in February.

Now, just over two years after CEO Cheng Lu rejoined the company in the role after being fired, he expects the business to take off in 2026.

This is thanks to a video game based on the hit martial arts novels by Jin Yong which is expected 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 2023and 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 began working in 2021 to develop an animated feature based on the stories, Cheng said.

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

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

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

He said that the company plans to increase the number of people to around 500 next year, 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 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 the highest level, the 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 the gaming giant Tencent.

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

The United States under the Biden administration has increased limits on Chinese businesses' access to advanced semiconductors used to power generative AI.