On January 3, 2022, staff set up the TuSimple booth for CES 2022 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
TuSimple, the embattled Chinese self-driving trucking company, announced on Thursday that it has changed its name to CreateAI to focus on video games and animation.
The news comes as General Motors shuts down its Cruise Robo-taxi business of the monthOnce-hot self-driving startups have begun to weed out laggards. TuSimple spans the U.S. and Chinese markets and faces its own challenges: Concerns about vehicle safetyone $189 million settlement Securities Fraud Litigation and Delisted from Nasdaq in February.
Now, just over two years after CEO Cheng Lu rejoined the company after being fired, he expects the business to break even in 2026.
Cheng said that’s thanks to a video game based on Jin Yong’s popular martial arts novel, which will have its initial release that year. He expects revenue to reach “hundreds of millions” when the full version is launched in 2027.
Before delisting, TuSimple said this Loss of US$500,000 in the first three quarters of 2023and spent $164.4 million on research and development during that period.
Company co-founder Chen Mo has a “long history” with Jin Yong’s family and will begin developing an animated film based on Jin Yong’s story in 2021, Cheng said.
The company claims that its artificial intelligence capabilities in developing autonomous driving software lay the foundation for its development of generative artificial intelligence. This is the next generation technology powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which produces human-like responses to user prompts.
Along with the CreateAI rebrand, the company launched its first major artificial intelligence model called Ruyi, an open source model for vision 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 board of directors received strong support from our shareholders at the annual meeting.”
He said the company plans to increase the number of employees from 300 to about 500 next year.
Reduce production costs by 70%
Although still under the name TuSimple, the company announced a partnership with Shanghai Three-Body Animation in August Developed the first animated feature film and video game Adapted from the science fiction series “The Three-Body Problem”.
The company said at the time that it was launching a new business unit to develop generative artificial intelligence applications for video games and animation.
CreateAI looks to reduce top-tier, so-called costs Level 3 game production Cheng said it will grow by 70% in the next five to six years. He declined to say whether the company is in talks with the gaming giant Tencent.
When asked about the impact of U.S. restrictions, Cheng claimed there were no problems and said the company uses a mix of Chinese and non-Chinese cloud computing providers.
The United States under the Biden administration has increased restrictions on Chinese companies’ access to advanced semiconductors used to power artificial intelligence.
