Nvidia introduced generative artificial intelligence for game developers

The Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), as the engineers at Nvidia called it, has already attracted quite a few big names from the world of video games. Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed franchise) and MiHoYo (Genshin Impact) were among the first to test the new technology, which, according to Nvidia, should allow game developers to create more realistic and authentic characters.

The technology works by passing the actors' voices through a speech recognition model to generate text, which is then added to a large-scale language model (LLM). When the language model responds, that response is passed through the text-to-speech and animation models to produce the final product—a dynamic character that can speak to gamers in a more natural language.

It's not just a concept. Nvidia has produced a demo clip for CES 2024 that shows a dialogue between two non-player characters (NPCs), who at first are worried about the possibility that they are actually just digital constructs created by artificial intelligence. They then had a conversation with a representative of Nvidia. The company Convai, which specializes in conversational artificial intelligence, also participated in the demo.

Chinese giants Tencent and NetEase have also expressed interest in the new technology. Some of you will remember that the original idea for ACE technology was presented at Computex 2023. At that time, we learned that at launch the technology will work on all existing gaming engines, including the latest Unreal Engine 5. It can run in the cloud or on-premises offline hardware.

Technology reminds us of 2009 when Microsoft introduced Project Milo? Do you remember him?

When Project Milo was first introduced alongside the original Kinect for the Xbox 360, it was introduced to us as a game where you could really, realistically talk and interact with a boy named Milo, which was shown at E3 in a video that was so impressive that it generated a lot of public attention for the game and Kinect.

Unfortunately, it soon turned out that the project would remain in development hell. Apparently, ACE is the spiritual successor to the Milo project.

Like everywhere else, the use of artificial intelligence is a point of contention in the world of video games. Pawel Sasko of CD Projekt RED (The Witcher franchise) said that artificial intelligence will be "just another tool that we will use for productivity and game development".

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, is more reserved. "I think we're going to see some really amazing moves and a lot of promises of crazy progress that no one will be able to deliver."

Other developers, particularly in the creative fields of writing, acting and animation, have expressed concerns about plagiarism.