The vocal game generation large model may be the latest interpretation of "AI changing the game."

On December 12, Giant Network Group (002558.SZ) announced the "QianYing" vocal game generation large model at the 2024 China Game Industry Annual Conference. This may also be an important step for Giant Network Group in the "Game + AI" field after Chairman Shi Yuzhu's significant statement in February of this year that AI holds a strategic position equal to that of the gaming Business.

According to Zhitong Finance APP, the "QianYing" large game model includes the game video generation large model YingGame and the video dubbing large model YingSound. With the release of this large model, Giant Network Group has achieved a full matrix layout of self-developed semantic large models, voice large models, and video large models.

More importantly, as the capabilities of the "QianYing" large model are upgraded and iterated, AI will no longer just be an auxiliary tool for the gaming industry, but a disruptive change in game production pipelines, interaction methods, and gameplay. Based on video generation technology, the concept of creating games through text descriptions is expected to become a reality. At that time, it may enter an era of equality in game creation, where ordinary people can also participate in the development of complex games.

The "QianYing" large model is now in operation.

As a veteran "player" in China's gaming industry, Giant Network Group has been deeply involved in the gaming field for twenty years. Despite its long-standing fame, Giant Network Group always maintains the most sensitive awareness of the cutting-edge technologies in the Industry.

As early as the end of 2022, Giant Network Group proactively established an AI laboratory. Following this, the company's layout in the "gaming + AI" field pressed the "accelerate button". In 2023, Giant Network Group launched the "gaming + AI" efficiency enhancement platform; earlier this year, the self-developed large models GiantGPT, Bailing-TTS, etc., also made their appearances. Then this month, Giant Network Group introduced the "QianYing" large model, marking a new stage in Giant Network Group's "king's journey" in the "gaming + AI" space.

As mentioned at the beginning, the "QianYing" large model includes YingGame and YingSound. This latest research demonstrates the feasibility of achieving game creation through simple textual descriptions. According to reports, YingGame, developed by Giant Network Group's AI laboratory in collaboration with Tsinghua University's SATLab, is the first large model capable of generating game videos with diverse character movement and personality traits, as well as strong physical simulation characteristics, able to produce open-world game videos. YingSound, on the other hand, is a video dubbing large model co-developed by Giant Network Group's AI laboratory, Northwestern Polytechnical University’s ASLP Lab, and Zhejiang University, possessing powerful time alignment and video semantic understanding abilities, capable of adding realistic sound effects to silent videos, with diverse generalized application scenarios.

Interestingly, at the same time that Giant Network Group released the "QianYing" large model, it also launched the "QianYing Co-creation Plan". According to the plan, Giant Network Group will open up collaboration in model technology, application, original game projects, and other areas based on the large model's foundational technology.

From the series of "combined punches" launched by Giant Network Group, it is clear that Shi Yuzhu is obviously not satisfied with just using AI as a supplementary tool for the company's gaming business. Earlier this year, Shi Yuzhu proposed that Giant Network Group plans to explore creating an AI game incubation platform aimed at lowering the barriers to game development, allowing gaming enthusiasts without programming or development backgrounds to also create games.

In fact, the momentum of "AI + gaming" is currently strong. At the same time that Giant Network Group released the "QianYing" large model, Google's DeepMind launched the second-generation large-scale foundational world model, Genie 2; coincidentally, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, recently tweeted that his AI company xAI will establish an AI game studio with the purpose of "making gaming great again."

With the "QianYing" large model and the "QianYing Co-creation Plan" in place, reflecting on Shi Yuzhu's vision proposed ten months ago, it seems we can indeed start to anticipate the arrival of an AI gaming era.

Competing for the "Game + AI" wave.

For Giant Network Group and its leader, Shi Yuzhu, fully embracing the AI wave has become a "must option."

A background that must be mentioned is that, in fact, as early as 2016 or even earlier, Shi Yuzhu had already noticed the infinite possibilities of the integration of games and AI. In 2016, Shi Yuzhu teamed up with several domestic investors to invest heavily in the acquisition of the Israeli AI gaming company Playtika. As a "non-typical" gaming company, Playtika does not develop games but acquires games from other manufacturers and optimizes them using AI technology.

If viewed from today's perspective, a company like Playtika, driven by AI, would naturally be highly sought after by various funds. However, in 2016, Shi Yuzhu dared to spend heavily on acquiring Playtika, which is enough to prove that he had "understood" the immense value of AI in the gaming industry at that time.

With solid accumulation of diversified AI capabilities, Giant has established a complete set of AI technologies from research to application in the "Game + AI" field and has developed comprehensive technical solutions, leading the way in the gaming industry.

In terms of AI infrastructure, prior to the newly launched "QianYing" large model, the Giant Network AI Laboratory had already launched its self-developed general cognitive dialogue model "GiantGPT," voice large model "Bailing-TTS," and efficient coding large model "CodeBrain," taking the lead in creating a complete large model ecosystem covering text, vision, and voice in the industry, applying it across various stages like development, operation, publishing, and testing, forming a closed-loop production chain.

Based on a strong technical foundation, Giant Network Group is able to further enhance its AIGC core capabilities and achieve the advancement of infrastructure to upper-level applications. For instance, through a human-like Q&A system driven by large models, it can better answer player queries and effectively lower the entry threshold for newcomers; another example is the companion-type AI NPC, which provides players with intimate relationship experiences, enhancing playability and stickiness. Additionally, one-stop AI painting platform "Giant Mimicking Scene" and AI voice generation platform "Bailing" have also been successively implemented.

In the deep collision and integration of AI and games, Giant Network Group has also innovatively launched new AI gameplay. Earlier this year, Giant Network Group's party reasoning mobile game "Space Kill" released a new gameplay called "AI Endgame Challenge", which is entirely created by AI and is the industry's first AI-native gameplay based on multi-agent large models. In the game, real players can compete with AI players in an intellectual challenge, with "1 real person + N players" placing the real player in a multi-person online interactive reasoning scenario. Each AI player's speech and decision-making are produced in real-time by the large model, displaying high-intelligence behaviors such as strategy, cooperation, and disguise, providing real players with more strategic space and sparking a trend of challenging AI among the player community.

Considering various signs, Giant Network Group's reinvestment in "Games + AI" likely signifies that it aims to accomplish more than just using AI to help the company reduce costs and increase efficiency. From a long-term perspective, Giant Network Group hopes to use AI as a means to achieve disruptive innovation in gaming. Looking back at the "QianYing" large model with this long-term goal in mind, as this infrastructure continues to iterate and upgrade, Giant Network Group's AI gaming incubation platform may bring new outlooks to the entire gaming industry under increasingly mature conditions.

At that time, the gaming industry may break free from the old paradigm of hundreds of thousands of practitioners making games for billions of players, thereby completely breaking through the ceiling of game content creation and opening up new imaginative spaces for the gaming industry. In the words of Musk, it means making games great again.

In this historical process, the team led by Shi Yuzhu is also expected to achieve "the greatness of giants once again". Investors in the secondary market may also need to view Giant Network Group through a new lens and valuation system.