How to make an AI
feel real
Loneliness is a design problem nobody was solving well. Existing AI companions offered conversation — but not presence. They responded, but didn't feel alive. For anime enthusiasts who already form deep emotional bonds with fictional characters, the bar for believability was even higher.
The question wasn't how to build an AI. It was how to make one feel real.
(pitched to Sam Altman)
Sole designer across
three universities
As the sole product designer on a 12-person cross-university team — UVA, SJSU, and Harvard — I was the connective tissue between art direction, engineering, and LLM teams. Four distinct workstreams, all converging on one product.
Dec 22, 2023 · First team meeting over Zoom — UVA, SJSU, Harvard
The first character designs followed the research exactly — and landed completely flat. Users recognized them but felt nothing. That gap between what people describe and what actually moves them became the defining design lesson of this project.
The Fortune Teller wasn't arbitrary — she was the answer to a real behavioral pattern: users turning to AI not for conversation, but for guidance and meaning. Both characters were scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, leading with personality, backstory, and emotional register.
Fortune Teller — full design pipeline: sketch → greyscale → color
300 surveys.
One real insight.
300 surveys across US universities surfaced the real insight: users didn't want more AI capability — they wanted to feel seen. Anime enthusiasts were underserved by every existing product. The team narrowed hard: stop competing with Character AI head-on, own the niche entirely.
Stop competing with Character AI. Own the niche entirely.
Ship the world
before the app
When dev timelines slipped, the team shifted to IP-first marketing — weekly anime comic drops on TikTok, a Discord built around the characters. By launch, 130+ seed users were already emotionally invested. Emotional PMF was validated before the interface existed.
Post-launch overview — App Store, funding rounds, and community growth
With Sam Altman after the pitch
On May 1, 2024, the Kimi team pitched at Harvard to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — one of six founding teams selected from 270 submissions, competing for a $100K+ investment in a field spanning defense, research, and enterprise AI.
Getting into that room required more than a good idea. The pitch was built on a clear story: a niche deeply understood, a live product already in users' hands, and a design philosophy that bet on emotional authenticity over feature breadth.
Kimi was my first 0→1 product — and the distance between designing for a class and designing for real users turned out to be enormous. Not in craft, but in everything around it: ambiguity, urgency, and the constant negotiation between what you want to build and what a team of twelve people across three universities can actually ship.
I learned how to communicate design decisions to engineers who don't speak design. How to run research that surfaces what people feel, not just what they say. How to hold a creative vision steady through delays, pivots, and competing priorities — and when to let it go.
Being part of a founding team that raised $1M+, shipped a live product, and earned a seat in front of Sam Altman before most people my age had worked on anything beyond a class project — that changed how I see myself as a designer.