GameLook report / Today, the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) officially ended successfully in Shanghai.
As an international high-end cooperation and exchange platform jointly created by relevant state departments and Shanghai, WAIC is one of the most influential industry events in the field of artificial intelligence in the world.
Since its establishment in 2016, WAIC has attracted more than 2,000 speakers from more than 100 countries and regions, including Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award winners, OpenAI, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), etc. The top scientists of the company, as well as industry leaders such as Tesla’s Musk and AMD’s Su Zifeng.
Major companies and leaders in related fields have shared their latest experience and achievements in AI technology exploration and application on WAIC. From this perspective, WAIC has become an annual exam in artificial intelligence and related fields.
Over the past few decades, artificial intelligence-related technologies, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and human-computer interaction, have developed rapidly, and these technologies have also been applied in the game industry. GameLook found that since WAIC was launched, games and game technology have never been absent from this world-class artificial intelligence event.
Surprised at first glance, but it is only natural when you think about it carefully. Gaming has always been one of the most active industries in the wave of AI development. Almost every key stage of AI development is related to games. This association is also receiving more and more attention and research.
At WAIC 2023, whether it is Xiamen University, Central America, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University and other universities preparing to establish the “Game Artificial Intelligence University Joint Research Center”, or the Game Philosophy Research Center of Xiamen University, Shenzhen Artificial Intelligence Industry Association, Shanghai The “Fun Playing” Artificial Intelligence Game Artificial Intelligence Industry Observation Report (hereinafter referred to as the “Report”) jointly released by the Municipal Artificial Intelligence and Social Research Association focuses on the mutual pulling effect of games and artificial intelligence.
This year, many game-related companies, including Tencent, Netease, and Mihayou, also participated in the conference again, bringing a series of game technology and AI cutting-edge experience and achievement sharing. In addition to games, related content also involves culture and society. and many other levels.
Games, the best training range for AI
Electronic games have a long history with artificial intelligence. As early as 1956, IBM’s AI program could play chess on a 6×6 board.
As early products like Space Wars emerged from artificial intelligence laboratories in the 1960s, “video games” quickly entered the mass market as an emerging form of entertainment.
Since then, the scale effect brought by electronic games has rapidly driven the development of computer hardware and the reduction of costs, and enriched the content of related software.
At the same time, the relationship between video games and artificial intelligence is no longer limited to research. For example, “Pac-Man” developed by Toru Iwatani at Namco in 1980. The four ghosts in the game were captured It is regarded as one of the earliest practices of game AI.
Since then, game companies have also paid more and more attention to AI technology in game products. According to a report released by the research team of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in July last year, as early as 1999, the proportion of AI R&D personnel in game companies had reached 60%.
In the 1990s, history repeated itself. The strong consumption power of gamers and their insatiable demand for game screens and systems promoted the birth of GPUs dedicated to processing image operations. The current leading company in the field of new AI products, Nvidia It was during this period that it came into being.
Nvidia, which made a fortune in game graphics cards, has risen in the past nearly 30 years. It is almost one of the most vivid cases where the game industry quietly promotes the chip industry, thereby boosting the development of AI.
After decades of hardware iterations and performance upgrades, AI technology ushered in a key breakthrough after 2010. The Transformer structure in 2017 successfully promoted the AI deep learning model into the era of large models with billions of parameters.
In the new stage, it is not surprising that the game has once again become the most high-quality training range for AI by virtue of clear rules, complex scenes and massive data, strong interactivity and real-time performance, scalability and customizability.
In 2019, AlphaStar, an AI agent trained by Google’s DeepMind based on StarCraft 2, ranked above 99.8% of active players on Battle.net, and related research was published in the journal Nature.
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever also publicly stated that the game promoted the birth of ChatGPT. OpenAI is using “DOTA2” to let AI carry out intensive learning, which provides a reference for the later ChatGPT technology.
As for the theoretical level of game artificial intelligence, according to the report statistics, in the seven years from 2015 to 2022 after AlphaGO defeated the three-time European Go champion Fan Hui, the number of theoretical research papers on game artificial intelligence reached 1,625. In contrast, between 1971 and 2015, the number of AI research papers related to video games was less than 1,000.
Around 2020, video games that are truly based on AI experience have also begun to sprout. Nick Walton developed AI Dungeon in 2019, which uses OpenAI’s natural language model GPT-3 to create a text-based adventure game that can respond to the player’s Any input, and the possibilities are endless.
The report released on WAIC 2023 demonstrates the synergy between games and artificial intelligence from three perspectives: theory, hardware, and application. Among them, the public survey shows that 91.9% of the respondents believe that the game industry has supported the development of artificial intelligence technology by promoting the advancement of GPU.
Game company, the promoter of the rapid development of AI
The relationship between games and AI over the past few decades can be briefly summarized in two aspects: one is that games promote the development of AI, and the other is that AI empowers game innovation.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the close connection between games and AI that game manufacturers have never been absent at WAIC, the most influential industry event in the field of artificial intelligence in the world.
In 2018, YOOZOO participated in the conference as a “future experience officer” to showcase the company’s game AI technology achievements. It also introduced the practice of using massive data to predict players’ game needs and automatically updating game versions through cooperation with Google.
In 2019, Tencent Games held theme days for two games, Honor of Kings and League of Legends, in WAIC. Tencent’s AI Lab also joined hands with “Glory of the King” to share the latest achievements of the strategic collaborative AI “Juewu” at that time. It laid the groundwork for the official appearance of the “King’s Ultimate Enlightenment” AI at WAIC in 2021 two years later.
Since then, in the three years of 2020, 2021, and 2022 affected by the epidemic, the advantages of online and offline linkage have enriched the game companies participating in WAIC.
For example, in 2022, when the game industry is “star-gathered”, game manufacturers including Mihayou, Ali, Tencent, NetEase, FunPlus, Zulong, and Shengqu will gather together. Among them, experts from Netease AI Lab shared “the application of AI in the automatic production of art resources”, and Alibaba focused on cloud games, expounding the possibility of bringing new value to new cultural tourism.
In 2023, in the fields of generative AI and AIGC, technological achievements are changing with each passing day, and many game companies have more diverse experience and achievements in the exploration and application of AI. This is also an important reason why GameLook has long awaited the sharing of game companies on WAIC this year.
Facts have proved that the performance of game companies on WAIC this year did not disappoint GameLook.
AI + game technology, the next generation of important infrastructure for a digital-real society
In GameLook’s view, at this year’s WAIC, the content shared by game companies can be divided into three main directions, namely AI+games, AI+culture and AI+society.
Among them, AI+ games mainly focus on generative AI and AIGC’s support for game development, gameplay, and creativity. This is also one of the hottest topics in the game industry in the past year.
For example, Tencent’s multi-studio game studios joined the battle. Timi demonstrated the facial expression and mouth shape AI generation technology jointly developed with Tencent AI Lab. Photon introduced the GVoice AI Codec technology, which is the first in the world to implement AI Codec on the mobile terminal. Rubik’s Cube Demonstrated the world’s first product that applies reinforcement learning AI to fighting games – “Naruto” mobile game… Mihayou demonstrated the application of artificial intelligence in the development of game characters in the social open day event, allowing The virtual scene and the real scene can be integrated.
In terms of AI+ culture, several major domestic game companies have demonstrated the possibility of game companies taking responsibility for cultural inheritance through in-game linkage activities, cultural creation outside the game, and digital cultural preservation products.
At the WAIC “Game AI Application and Game Technology” forum, technical experts from Tencent Games shared three cases of game technology helping digital cultural preservation. Including the “Digital Great Wall”, which is the first public welfare product that applies game technology to the protection of human cultural heritage and realizes millimeter-level high-precision, immersive interactive digital restoration of the largest cultural heritage; and the world’s first new generation using game technology “Hyperspace Participatory Museum” – “Digital Sutra Cave”; there is also an immersive interactive experience of cultural heritage provided by game technology innovation, which will help the progress and progress of the “Digital Central Axis Small Universe” project for the Beijing Central Axis application for World Heritage in 2024. results. It shows the possibility of game technology serving the cultural field and creating more value.
In addition, Tencent Games also set up the “Digital Great Wall” naked-eye 3D holographic projection exhibition in the offline exhibition area, so that the audience can experience “climbing” the Digital Great Wall and feel the real immersive interaction. The project is very popular, and visitors who want to experience the exhibition have to wait in long queues.
With the help of game technology, the Great Wall and more cultural relics are no longer ancient relics that will gradually wear out over time, nor are they collections that require people to cross the barrier of time and space before they can touch them, but have become the cultural information behind them Assets that can really be preserved and touched.
As for the third direction, AI+society, not only game companies, but the entire WAIC is a display of the latest exploration and achievements in this field. But when it comes to game companies, Netease Fuxi launched the first unmanned loading robot and excavating robot in China based on AOP theory and self-developed industrial model, and participated in the construction of front-line scenes such as mines and railways. Tencent demonstrated a new generation of visual system jointly built with China Southern Airlines based on virtual image display technology and game engine technology. This achievement has achieved a breakthrough in the key technology of the self-developed visual system, completed the intergenerational upgrade of the visual system of the flight simulator, and will provide more efficient and safer flight training for more than 80,000 civil aviation pilots.
It is not difficult to predict that in addition to game development, cutting-edge game technology has the ability to become a solution at the social level. I believe that in the future, it will also have full potential in many aspects such as intelligent driving and urban traffic planning.
Conclusion:
At the opening ceremony of WAIC 2023, Tesla CEO Musk said in a video speech that “Once China is determined to do one thing, it will be able to do a good job in this industry, including artificial intelligence of course.” industry. So I believe China will have strong AI capabilities.”
Reviewing previous WAICs, we can see that the exploration and practice of game companies in AI is diverse and in-depth. Games are not only the best practice field for AI technology, but also the best application field for AI technology. Game companies not only use AI technology to improve game quality and innovation capabilities, but also use AI technology to inherit culture and serve the society.
It can be said that game companies are the promoters of the rapid development of AI and the beneficiaries of the extensive empowerment of AI. China has the largest game market in the world. Next, what kind of chemical reaction will happen between games and artificial intelligence is worth looking forward to.
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