China’s autonomous truck company TuSimple turns to genAI for gaming

Chinese self-driving car company TuSimple has changed its name to CreateAI, focusing on video games and animation, the company announced Thursday.

The news comes as GM folded its Cruise robotaxi business this monthand the once-red-hot self-driving startup sector has begun weeding out stragglers. TuSimple, which was sandwiched between the US and China markets, had its own challenges: vehicle safety concernsa $189 million settlement of a suit for securities fraud and delisted from the Nasdaq in February.

Now, just over two years after CEO Cheng Lu rejoined the company after being ousted, he hopes the business can break even by 2026.

That’s thanks to a video game based on Jin Yong’s hit martial arts novels that is slated to release an initial version that year, Cheng said. He predicts “several hundreds of millions” in revenue by 2027 when the full version launches.

Before the recall, TuSimple said so lost $500,000 in the first three quarters of 2023and spent $164.4 million on research and development during that time.

The company’s co-founder, Mo Chen, has a “long history” with the Jin Yong family and began working in 2021 to develop an animated feature based on the stories, Cheng said.

The company claims that its artificial intelligence capabilities in self-driving software development give it a foundation from which to develop generative AI. This is the cutting-edge technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts.

Along with the CreateAI rebrand, the company debuted its first major AI model called Ruyi, an open source model for visual work, available through the Hugging Face platform.

“It’s clear that our shareholders see the value in this transformation and want to move in this direction,” Cheng said. “Our management team and our Board of Directors have received overwhelming support from shareholders.” The company said it plans to hold its annual shareholder meeting on Friday.

He said the company plans to increase the number of employees to about 500 next year, up from 300.

While still under the TuSimple name, the company announced a partnership with Shanghai Three Body Animation in August develop the first animated feature film and video game based on the series of science fiction novels “The Three-Body Problem”.

The company said at the time that it was launching a new business segment to develop generative AI applications for video games and animation.

CreateAI hopes to lower the cost of the so-called top tier triple A game production 70% in the next five to six years, Cheng said. He declined to share whether the company was in talks with the gaming giant Tencent.

Asked about the impact of US restrictions, Cheng said there was no problem and said the company used a mix of Chinese and non-Chinese cloud computing providers.

The United States under the Biden administration has increased limits on Chinese companies’ access to advanced semiconductors used to power generative AI.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that CreateAI, formerly TuSimple, plans to hold its annual shareholder meeting on Friday.