Nvidia introduced generative artificial intelligence for game developers

Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), as it was named by the engineers at Nvidia, has already attracted quite a few famous 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 players in a more natural language.

It's not just a concept. Nvidia has prepared a presentation clip for CES 2024, which 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. That's when we learned that the technology will work on all existing gaming engines at launch, including the latest Unreal Engine 5. It can run over the cloud or offline on local hardware.

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

When the Milo project was firstč introduced alongside the original Kinect for the Xbox 360, it was introduced to us as a game where you can 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.

However, it soon became clear that the project would remain in development hell. Obviously, ACE is the spiritual successor of the Milo project.

As everywhere else, in the world of video games, the use of artificial intelligence is a point of contention. Pawel Sasko from the studio 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 incredible moves and a lot of promises about crazy progress that no one will be able to fulfill."

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