Who can have the earliest insight into the future of AIGC? Exclusive interview with Kunlun Wanwei Chairman and CEO Fang Han丨AI tours the entertainment industry

文/James

The emergence of mobile phones has subverted cameras, and mobile payments have replaced wallets... Many times, what impacts or even completely subverts existing industries is not competitors in the same industry, but cross-industry competitors. "Dimensionality reduction strike"

Maybe search engines are like this

At the beginning of this year, Microsoft's Bing search took the lead in introducing a large language model and providing a chat interface based on GPT-4, making it jump out in terms of market share and influence, becoming competition that Google cannot ignore. opponent. Although Google has always been at the forefront of the industry in artificial intelligence research and development, since its search business is its main source of revenue, its attitude towards its own innovation is relatively conservative

In China, Kunlun Wanwei is a well-known game development and operation company. They were the first in the industry to launch an artificial intelligence search engine. The degree of completion of this search engine is quite high, enough to bring a new dimension to existing domestic search products. A kind of "cross-border" competitive pressure

Based on the self-developed Tiangong model, Kunlun Wanwei has launched three main C-end products, namely AI dialogue, AI search and AI creation. The company also stands out for its forward-thinking approach to globalization and content creation. In early September, Professor Yan Shuicheng, a top international expert in the field of computer vision and machine learning, joined the company, and Club Koala, an AI UGC game platform independently developed by the company, will also be launched soon.

Recently, Entertainment Capitalism·Visual Future interviewed Fang Han, chairman and CEO of Kunlun Wanwei, and discussed in depth the company’s latest trends and future vision in AI.

Tiangong AI Tools: AIGC does not have to be a chat

Trying Tiangong AI search for a short time can leave a deep impression on people.

On the occasion that the first batch of 8 domestic large models have passed the registration, Entertainment Capital Theory and Vision Future have just conducted the second horizontal evaluation of domestic large models, in which we can see the performance of Tiangong AI Search in specific content generation tasks. Have excellent performance.

Fang Han explained that Kunlun Wanwei’s team has accumulated experience in the search field for longer than it appears on the surface. The team spent six years accumulating in the search field and then gradually integrated it into a product.

Six years ago, Kunlun Wanwei launched a news recommendation product called "Opera News" online. This is an information flow product mainly for overseas markets. It aggregates information processing and push on hundreds of thousands of websites in dozens of countries. This process is essentially a small search engine. At present, the crawling frequency of key websites has been increased to once per minute.

Over the past six years, Kunlun Wanwei’s technical team has accumulated rich capabilities in pre-training data collection, cleaning and deep processing. They are also looking into ways to ensure the authenticity of information, such as rating various information source websites. The team has accumulated experience and response strategies for issues such as how to push information, how to adjust content to suit domestic users, and how to avoid information isolation

The birth of Kunlun Tiangong AI Search was due to the introduction of two hundreds of billions-level models, namely the hundreds of billions of pre-training base models and the hundreds of billions of RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) model bases

Fang Han mentioned some interesting user cases, including a civil servant writing a work summary and using AI search to learn how to write a review for a teacher. These cases made him realize that the product’s application scenarios are broader

Tiangong AI Search will also provide image search, image understanding and other functions in the future. These AI tools may generate revenue through advertising, but Fang Han believes that advertising is not the main profit model

In addition to AI search, Tiangong also includes AI dialogue and AI creation products. Entertainment Capital Theory and Vision Future tested the same writing task "What kind of delicacies are there in West Lake?" and asked each of Tiangong's three different products to perform on their performance.

The results of Tiangong AI dialogue are relatively concise, while the content created by Tiangong AI will be richer. Tiangong AI search may add content from other platforms such as Zhihu columns, and the quoted content has clear sources

(Tiangong AI dialogue)

(Created by Tiangong AI)

(Tiangong AI search)

Tiangong AI search, Tiangong AI dialogue, and Tiangong AI creation belong to three independent interfaces, unlike other similar products that are integrated into a unified chat window. The reason for this design is Fang Han's observation that most users do not know how to write prompts and need appropriate guidance. Many users tend to indulge in "teasing AI" in the conversation interface. After changing to a search box, the commands entered by the user are more practical

One conclusion Fang Han came to is that what ordinary users need more is to "generate end-to-end content" and get the finished product directly, instead of providing them with a tool to make semi-finished products and then adjust them. The transformation process in the middle needs to be "packaged". Rewrite: One conclusion Fang Han came to is that what ordinary users need more is to directly obtain the "end-to-end content generation" of the finished product, rather than providing them with a tool that allows them to make semi-finished products first and then make adjustments. This conversion process requires "packaging"

Therefore, the Tiangong team plans to launch a tool that can generate comics, animations or short videos with one click as their "next big move". They put a lot of time and effort into figuring out how to translate the script into storyboards and then into comics. In this way, the conversion to AI animation will be more natural and smooth in the future

Such products will be launched in overseas markets first. Fang Han believes that overseas gamers are more tolerant of inaccurate content and expect creative and surprising output results. They support English, Japanese, and Korean from the beginning, and plan to support Thai, Hindi, etc. in the future.

AI Games: Free World and Digital Companion

However, the artificial intelligence applications to be discussed next will break through people's conventional impressions of artificial intelligence more than the ones mentioned earlier

On August 25, Play for Fun, a game studio owned by Kunlun Wanwei, demonstrated their independently developed AI UGC game platform Club Koala at the Cologne exhibition in Germany. This is China’s first AI game to enter the international market

Kunlun Wanwei has been operating in overseas markets for nearly 20 years, so it has considerable say in the overseas expansion of domestic games. Fang Han believes that one of the experiences is to pay more attention to the "platform" rather than the "plot" during the development process. Chinese companies are relatively good at the development of tools and platforms, and can avoid the potential culture clash that may come with first-party content development

Club Koala is a light-story, free-world oriented game. It is essentially a UGC platform that provides tools to allow users to create freely, which is also in line with their main strategy for overseas markets.

Almost all elements of this game, from NPC conversations to clothes, furniture, mini-games and scripts, can be randomly generated by AI-driven or created by players themselves. In the process of pinching props, players can even create content by "moving their mouths" without the need to manually adjust or even write code as before

Club Koala’s goal is to apply artificial intelligence to the entire process of content creation to make it easier for users to create content and form a community culture. Fang Han believes that although the content created by most users may not be of high quality, as long as a certain proportion of the content has sales value, a market can be formed

AI NPC character is another bold innovation of Club Koala. Each player can create an exclusive companion character. This character has its own memory and career, and has a massive question bank that can answer players' open questions. AI NPC characters are another bold innovation of Club Koala. Each player can create an exclusive companion character. This character has its own memories and career, and has a massive question bank that can answer players' open questions

In terms of multi-round dialogue, the effect of Character.ai and Replika is currently close to that of Character.ai and Replika in some tests. By leveraging large-scale models and engineering capabilities to realize the memory of multiple rounds of conversations, a database similar to human long-term memory and short-term memory is created

This database organizes vector data through a large number of tags. In the conversation, the tag will be located first, and then the answer will be analyzed in detail to improve response speed. They also weight and rank memories that are important or unimportant based on factors such as the character's personality. Finally, there are some special small models for occasions such as chatting. Combined, these methods avoid the computational cost of using large models multiple times.

Spending so much effort designing an in-game NPC is definitely not just for show off skills. In Fang Han's plan, this AI-driven digital companionship project has social value beyond games.

At the beginning of the launch of Club Koala, the first priority is to make users willing to chat with NPCs; after the test goes smoothly, the same character will hopefully be available in other Kunlun Worldwide games, and even on other non-game products and interfaces. Continue to exist as a full-time companion. From this perspective, AI NPCs are a base that can be used in all games, and they are experimenting on this base.

Fang Han mentioned that the AI ​​game is a brand new project and has had an impact on the original organizational structure. They have fully shifted the entire studio to platforms and products. This transformation process has been relatively smooth, and employees are also looking forward to making AI games.

The importance of combining large-scale B-side applications with chip layout

Kunlun Wanwei recently announced that it has reached a cooperation worth more than 10 million yuan with Millywood Technology (the parent company of Inke). Their artificial intelligence technology can help anchors provide more personalized chat services to their "first tens of thousands of users." Fang Han said that Yingke chose to use Kunlun Tiangong because it has better results in multi-round dialogue and emotional dialogue

In this project, Tianhui will screen the corpus of high-quality anchors, help customers train representative anchor roles, and then add prompt words based on the anchor's image, mantra and other information to allow the model to "role play". The challenge lies in corpus cleaning and small sample learning. The final form of the product is left to the customer to develop.

So, has Tiangong found important customers in other fields? Fang Han said that Tiangong B-side mainly focuses on human resources, finance and pharmaceutical fields. Kunlun Wanwei's affiliated companies, such as overseas mobile payment projects OPay and Keya Medical, all have the potential to implant artificial intelligence. At present, Tiangong has reached cooperation agreements with some human resources companies, and specific details will be announced later

He believes that compared to other model developers, his three years of experience in training and fine-tuning large models, with iterations every two weeks, makes it unique and the bottom layer more controllable. His product capabilities and long-term thinking help create reusable SaaS products instead of just being a one-time "construction team"

Kunlun Wanwei has the C-end genes of multinational game and application developers, making them more familiar with the C-end development path. At the same time, they will also invest in some C-side companies. In addition, they also invest in new materials, chips and other fields

On September 20, Kunlun Wanwei officially announced that it would invest in and control the AI ​​computing power chip company Aijie Core, completing the layout of the entire AGI and AIGC industry chain. Aijie Kexin is mainly engaged in the research and development and production of AI large computing power and supporting chips, with a special focus on the intelligent computing of generative AI. The core team is composed of well-known experts and scholars in chip research and development, integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, large language models and other fields.

Globalization strategy is the eye-catching label of Kunlun Wanwei. The company's overseas revenue has consistently accounted for more than 50% for a long time, and the latest financial report data shows that the proportion is as high as 83%. In addition to games, the Opera browser is another classic example of a company's globalization. It is headquartered in Norway, but most of its research and development takes place in Poland. On the basis of mature businesses such as Opera News, innovations such as the new AI-adapted browser Opera One and the artificial intelligence service Aria continue to emerge. Opera currently has a global average monthly active user of nearly 400 million.

Recently, Professor Yan Shuicheng joined Kunlun Wanwei. This news has attracted widespread attention. As a top international expert in the field of computer vision and machine learning, he once said that Kunlun Wanwei’s pragmatic attitude, long-term perspective and vision of establishing an international large-scale model team attracted his attention

With the joining of Professor Yan, Kunlun Wanwei's "2050 Global Research Institute" has begun operations, and plans to set up research centers in Singapore, London and Silicon Valley to attract more overseas talents. This will allow the company to invest more resources in the field of basic large models and actively participate in open source community contributions

Can these forward-looking thinking and layouts allow Kunlun Wanwei to see the future earlier than most people?

Fang Han has been paying attention to the development of artificial intelligence technology for many years. In the past year or so, he has been reading papers related to artificial intelligence almost every day. He believes that the current artificial intelligence trend is driven by technology, or even by papers, rather than by products, because technology is still changing rapidly

After mentioning the big model, the next "big thing" is that Fang Han voted for multi-modality, especially video generation. He considers video generation to be “the crown jewel of the content industry.” Once the problems of consistency and style in video generation are solved, the entire film and television industry will be completely reshaped, and some people even doubt whether cameras will be needed in the future

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