Chinese autonomous truck company TuSimple taps genAI for gaming

Embattled Chinese autonomous truck company TuSimple has changed its name to CreateAI, focusing on video games and animation, the company announced Thursday.

The news comes when GM closed its Cruise robotaxi business this monthand the once-popular sector of self-driving startups has begun weeding out laggards. Spanning the US and China markets, TuSimple had its own challenges: vehicle safety concernsto $189 million deal of a securities fraud lawsuit and Nasdaq delisting in February.

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

That’s thanks to a video game based on Jin Yong’s best-selling martial arts novels that will release an initial version that year, Cheng said. It anticipates “several hundred million” in revenue in 2027, when the full version is released.

Before the delisting, 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 film based on the stories, Cheng said.

The company says its AI capabilities in developing self-driving software give it a foundation for developing generative AI. That’s the next-level technology powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts.

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

“It is clear that our shareholders see the value of this transformation and want to move in this direction,” Cheng said. “Our management team and 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 staff to about 500 next year, up from 300.

Co-founder Xiaodi Hou, who claims to be the company’s largest individual shareholder at 29.7%, has publicly questioned the shift toward games and animation. Hou said he would withhold or oppose support at the shareholders meeting and called for the company’s liquidation. Hou has since founded his own Houston-based autonomous transportation company, Bot Auto, which said it obtained $20 million in financing in September.

Although still under the name TuSimple, the company announced in August a partnership with Shanghai Three Body Animation to Develop the first feature-length animation and video game film. Based on the science fiction novel series “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 reduce the cost of so-called higher tiers triple A game production by 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.

When asked about the impact of the US restrictions, Cheng claimed there were no problems and said the company used a mix of cloud computing providers from China and outside of China.

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, is scheduled to hold its annual shareholder meeting on Friday.