She Wants to Build a "Super Playground" for the AI Era | A Conversation with Roi: Founder / CEO of Intermission --- The first time I met Roi, she had just returned from Burning Man and was sporting a deep tan. This former product lead at ByteDance and early employee at Musical.ly has a resume that would make most tech workers envious. But what struck me more was her restlessness — a constant urge to tear things down and rebuild them. In 2023, she founded Intermission, an AI-native content platform. The name itself is telling: "intermission," the break between acts. She believes we're living in the intermission between the old internet and whatever comes next. "Everyone's talking about AI replacing creators," she told me. "I think that's the wrong question. The real question is: what new forms of expression become possible when everyone has an AI co-pilot?" Her answer is what she calls a "super playground" — not a content consumption platform, but a space where users create, remix, and play with AI-generated characters and worlds. The aesthetic leans heavily into what she describes as "digital maximalism": neon gradients, glitch effects, characters that feel like they've stepped out of a Y2K fever dream. The product has attracted a

She Wants to Build a "Super Playground" for the AI Era | A Conversation with Roi: Founder / CEO of Intermission --- The first time I met Roi, she had just returned from Burning Man and was sporting a deep tan. This former product lead at ByteDance and early employee at Musical.ly has a resume that would make most tech workers envious. But what struck me more was her restlessness — a constant urge to tear things down and rebuild them. In 2023, she founded Intermission, an AI-native content platform. The name itself is telling: "intermission," the break between acts. She believes we're living in the intermission between the old internet and whatever comes next. "Everyone's talking about AI replacing creators," she told me. "I think that's the wrong question. The real question is: what new forms of expression become possible when everyone has an AI co-pilot?" Her answer is what she calls a "super playground" — not a content consumption platform, but a space where users create, remix, and play with AI-generated characters and worlds. The aesthetic leans heavily into what she describes as "digital maximalism": neon gradients, glitch effects, characters that feel like they've stepped out of a Y2K fever dream. The product has attracted a

April 1, 2026

🚥 This week on Crossing, our guest is Roi, founder and CEO of "Mujian," an AI interactive platform. Mujian recently closed two consecutive funding rounds, raising a total of tens of millions of dollars.

If Character AI represents the previous phase of the human-AI relationship — chatting, companionship, emotional projection — then Roi wants to build the next phase: not just talking to AI, but entering an AI-driven, ever-evolving world where you can find a lighter, more fragmented, more addictive kind of joy.

In this episode, we go far beyond Mujian itself. We use Roi and her startup as a lens to examine an emerging question: as "chatting with AI" starts to feel stale, what will the next generation of AI consumer products look like?

More complex characters? More immersive narratives? "Worlds" that users can create, enter, observe, and manipulate?

And who will be the first to truly capture this wave — professional developers, established game teams, or AI-native creators who never learned to code but possess intense expressive and creative drive?

In Roi's vision, Mujian wants to become a "super playground" for the AI era — with romance simulators, livestream tipping simulators, celebrity simulators, stock market simulators, and a growing cohort of Gen Z women rapidly "hand-crafting" new worlds from their phones, using prompts and their own desires.

If you follow AI consumer products, consumer-grade platforms, content platforms, gaming, agents — or if you're asking yourself: beyond efficiency gains, can AI create new forms of joy? New creative ecosystems? New platform opportunities?

This episode should give you plenty to think about.

🎬 Our video podcast is now live on Koji Yang Yuancheng's WeChat Channels, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and YouTube.

📒 The transcript will be published on the Crossing WeChat official account.

🟢 00:00:14 Rapid Fire

Age, alma mater, MBTI and zodiac sign, one-sentence pitch for Mujian, funding status, revenue and order volume, pre-founder experience

🟢 00:01:30 Mujian Sells "Ideal Life Experiences"

The lives you can't have in reality are the ones best suited for simulators. Time-traveling to the Song dynasty, 16-person speed dating, sugar mama scenarios — at their core, they're all low-cost respawns of "scarce real-world experiences." The biggest flaw of Earth OL might be that you can't switch accounts and start over. Simulators don't replicate reality; they rewrite life to be more dramatic, more condensed, more fun.

🟢 00:03:31 Three Paths for AI Interactive Products

One is companionship, one is interactive narrative, and the third — the one she's most bullish on — is "simulators." A simulator isn't chatting with a character; it's interacting with a system. Beyond AI coding, roleplay is already one of the largest API consumption scenarios.

🟢 00:08:55 What's Closest to Breaking Out?

Showing off technical prowess isn't the same as building a consumer product. The experiences closest to actual monetization are surprisingly朴素 [plain/simple] interactive ones. A simulator shell she built in three days already had people willing to pay. The real problem isn't lack of demand — it's that the funnel still isn't smooth enough.

🟢 00:11:05 The Enemy of Loopit and Its Kin

If ByteDance can build it in a month, why should your platform exist? Loopit-style lightweight interactive content isn't hard for Douyin to replicate. The real question isn't "can they do it?" but "why would users come specifically to you?" If you're just wrapping old gameplay in an AI veneer, your moat will be extremely fragile.

🟢 00:13:31 Total Freedom Is Often Not Fun

The freer the experience, the faster users burn out. A good experience isn't letting users do whatever they want — it's designing feedback loops that make them want to take the next step. Her core insight is worth remembering for all AI products: control is essential to experience.

🟢 00:19:26 What Is Real Positive Feedback?

Generation isn't experience. A good simulator makes users feel: my input actually changed the world. The product's key metric isn't response length, but the desire to keep playing.

🟢 00:24:41 Romance Isn't Mujian's Endgame

Romance happened to take off first, but that doesn't mean the platform is limited to it. Wherever there's spending, content will inevitably expand from single-character interactions into more simulator forms. Users won't forever play only one genre — they'll forever want to play whatever's more fun.

🟢 00:28:07 The First People AI Truly Reaches

The people who first truly figured out AI may not be on GitHub at all. Many of the earliest core users and creators are Gen Z women with high sensitivity to fantasy content. They care about model personality, relational tension, writing style, and immersion. The source of AI super-creators may not be technical communities, but rather the people who dream the most vividly. This is one of the best early signals for a new platform: passion precedes commercialization.

🟢 00:38:25 What She Wants to Build: "Xiaohongshu for AI Interaction"

Xiaohongshu shares the beauty of real life; Mujian wants to share the beauty of AI-empowered virtual life. It's not just a content platform — it wants to become a new kind of content community. The core isn't one-time consumption, but the continuous discovery of new ideal-life fragments.

🟢 00:49:00 Many People Don't Want to Win — They Just Fear Losing

The most insidious enemy of entrepreneurship isn't risk; it's the保本 [capital-preservation] mentality. She doesn't shy away from unfairness, but cares more about whether she has the courage to do what she truly wants. Rather than "don't fail," she's choosing "let me try to win once." This is the hardest layer of her entrepreneurial foundation.

🟢 01:06:59 World Models

Optimistic about world models, just not convinced they're consumer-ready today. The real opportunity belongs to those building infrastructure around AI interaction ahead of time.

🟢 01:10:40 AI Native Moats Are Three Layered Capabilities

Infrastructure capability. The understanding of "what counts as fun." And most critically, continuous feedback from that core user base.

🟢 01:14:28 AI Will First Amplify Super-Individuals

AI doesn't level everyone — it turns the most idea-rich people into armies. What she's really betting on isn't just simulators, but the rise of super-creators. Many future worlds may not be built by companies, but by individuals.

🟢 01:20:58 Ten "I Am..." Sentences

Subscribe to Crossing: 🚦 We follow the industry shifts and entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new wave of AI technology.

🚦 Crossing is Steve Jobs' metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming every industry. We seek out, interview, and bring together a new generation of AI founders and active builders in the AI era. Together with them, we explore and embrace the new changes, the new possibilities.

👦🏻 Host Koji: I founded Crossing, launched AI Hacker House — a community space for a new generation of AI founders — and serve as Venture Partner at ZhenFund. I believe technology, especially AI, represents the greatest value-creation opportunity of our generation. Koji on Jike, Koji's website

👧🏻 Host Ronghui: I co-founded Crossing, worked at a dollar-denominated VC, and spent five years as a Silicon Valley correspondent, following tech development and business stories. Feel free to reach out and chat. Ronghui on Jike