Breaking out of the zero-sum game, is AIGC the 'life reminder' or the 'life-sustaining pill' of the Metaverse?

Article | Intelligent Relativity

Author | Qingyue

The metaverse that came out of the science fiction novel "Avalanche" is now experiencing an "avalanche of land prices."

A survey by CoinGecko shows that the land prices of five well-known metaverses, namely Otherdeed for Otherside, The Sandbox, Decentraland, Somnium Space and Voxels Metaverse, have recently declined to varying degrees.

Among them, singer JJ Lin once spent US$123,000 to purchase three pieces of virtual real estate in Decentraland. Now they are only worth about US$10,000, with a floating loss of 91%.

(Source: CoinGecko)

The “land price avalanche” is one of the most obvious manifestations of the ebbing of the overall popularity of the Metaverse. In addition, major manufacturers at home and abroad are not paying much attention to the Metaverse as before.

All in Metaverse’s RealityLabs lost a total of US$13.717 billion in 2022, an increase of 34.57% from the loss in 2021; the market value of Roblox, once the first stock in the Metaverse, evaporated by approximately US$60 billion in one year; Tencent also announced All XR positions have been cancelled.

Because major manufacturers at home and abroad have invariably attracted the attention of AIGC.

Overseas, all Microsoft Office, Azure cloud services and other products will be fully integrated with ChatGPT, and Google has also released Bard, the next-generation conversational AI system based on Google's LaMDA large model. Focusing on the country, Baidu officially announced the large-scale model project "Wen Xin Yi Yan" it is developing, and Chinese companies such as Alibaba and JD.com also said they are developing or planning to develop similar products.

So, with the continuous development of natural language processing technology based on deep learning, will the large generative AI models represented by Wen Xinyiyan and ChatGPT in the future further squeeze the living space of the Metaverse?

AIGC doesn’t want to be the enemy of the Metaverse?

The relationship between the Metaverse and AIGC is by no means a "zero-sum game" in which each other's gains must be my losses. Instead, it is more like a "positive-sum game."

After all, the Metaverse is a new digital ecosystem formed by the aggregation of many advanced technologies such as 5G communications, artificial intelligence, robots, the Internet, and blockchain. In the digital ecosystem of the Metaverse, AI is originally one of the underlying technologies that supports the experience.

From this perspective, the emergence and maturity of large generative AI models represented by Wen Xinyiyan and ChatGPT will only further "mature" the metaverse.

First, AIGC can inject "experience soul" into the metaverse.

Take XR and digital people as an example. If the metaverse is regarded as a large-scale MMORPG game, then virtual digital people are like NPCs and players in the game, and XR is the channel linking the players and the game. Without the "channel" and "player", this game has lost its "soul".

However, the current technological level of XR and digital humans is obviously not enough to support the "story" of the metaverse. You must know that so far, the technology of virtual digital humans is not smart enough and does not support continuous dialogue with memory; VR also faces the dilemma of lack of content and insurmountable dizziness.

However, when XR and virtual digital people are "connected" to AIGC, not only can the language interaction function of virtual digital people be optimized, but the knowledge graph of virtual digital people can also move from a single field to a comprehensive field; XR hardware can also be used in By calling ChatGPT related functions in multiple links such as the system layer, the interaction method of AR content may usher in new changes.

Considering this, at least a dozen virtual digital human manufacturers have announced that their virtual digital human products will be connected to the ChatGPT interface. At the same time, many domestic companies such as Li Weike, Rokid, Thunderbird Innovation, and Yingmu have announced that their virtual digital human products will be connected to the ChatGPT interface. AR glasses startups have already begun trying to integrate ChatGPT into their products.

Secondly, AIGC can help form the content creation ecosystem of the Metaverse.

Although currently generative AI represented by ChatGPT mainly focuses on 2D information such as text and image generation, it is foreseeable that as the iteration speed of large models continues to accelerate, generative AI will soon be involved. 3D field.

By then, AIGC may greatly improve the efficiency of content generation, reduce costs, and provide tool support for building a more ambitious scenario of the Metaverse.

To give a simple example, in a "complete" metaverse game, if it must at least reach the level of the oasis in "Ready Player One", then it is necessary to build more diverse and more detailed scenes. Industry insiders have estimated that if the visual effects are taken into account, the cost of a picture by a professional painter may be between 5,000 yuan and 10,000 yuan. Then the funds required to build a complete world will be an astronomical figure, and it is by no means a one-time figure. Two Internet companies can afford it.

In such a market environment, AIGC, as a new content creation method after PGC and UGC, uses artificial intelligence technology to automatically produce content. The cost of a picture can be reduced to 4 cents, or even lower, and is more efficient. high. For example, with the help of NVIDIA instant-ngp and tiny-cuda-nn, the speed of NetEase Yaotai neural implicit surface modeling has been optimized from 10 hours at the beginning to 10 to 20 minutes. Compared with traditional MAYA manual modeling Efficiency is increased a hundred times.

Combining these characteristics, "Intelligent Relativity" believes that even though the popularity of AIGC is booming, the Metaverse is losing its former discussion, but AIGC is not here to compete with the popularity of the Metaverse or even take away the "job". On the contrary, there is a positive linear relationship between the two. The maturity of generative AI technology will bring breakthrough opportunities to the Metaverse.

Is the Metaverse a "real collapse" or a "false flameout"?

AIGC will play an important role in the construction of the future Metaverse, but it is undeniable that the Metaverse has now entered a "pain period", which is inseparable from the emergence and development of AIGC.

An obvious practical problem is that in the two high-intensity competition arenas of Metaverse and AIGC, no company can enter the market at the same time with "deep financial resources".

If you want to run through a model with more than 10 billion parameters, you must at least achieve the level of "kcal/month". Calculated based on the average price of a GPU of 50,000 yuan, 1,000 GPUs means 50 million yuan in a single month computing power cost.

According to industry estimates, GPT-3 involves 175 billion parameters and the training cost is approximately US$12 million. According to estimates from the Guosheng Securities report, the cost of training GPT-3 is approximately US$1.4 million, and each training mission is costly.

AIGC’s cost investment still has clear accounts to calculate, but it is difficult to see an end to the cost of the Metaverse that “can accommodate the future”.

Especially, in the current weak macro economy, when the industry's "main theme" enters into cost reduction and efficiency improvement, most companies will do the most cost-effective thing between the "relatively distant" Metaverse and the "sufficiently close" AIGC. s Choice.

Furthermore, In addition to the higher predictability of cost-effectiveness of AIGC, in terms of returns, the domestic Metaverse has not yet achieved large-scale commercialization, and it is difficult to bring returns in the short term, but AIGC already has a predictable business ization link.

Jiang Guowen, Blue Army Consultant of Huawei, also said: "At present, the development of the Metaverse has not yet crossed the rift, and it is expected to enter the early stage of business commercialization in 10 years."

In contrast, generative AI technology represented by ChatGPT can actually improve users’ productivity in areas such as search and content tools, and can also bring a certain amount of income. Since Baidu opened Wenxin Yiyan for internal testing on March 16, 150,000 companies have applied for Wenxin Yiyan internal testing, of which more than 300 ecological partners have achieved test results in more than 400 specific scenarios.

Comparing the two, it is not difficult to understand why more companies are willing to invest resources in AIGC instead of the Metaverse.

The emergence of AIGC has indeed "non-actively" squeezed part of the "living space" of the Metaverse. From a long-term perspective, the Metaverse still has a high level of imagination.

On the one hand, although some Internet companies have "backed off", many domestic local governments still insist on launching new layouts in the Yuanverse field.

For example, the Suzhou Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology recently released the 2023 Suzhou Yuanverse major application scenario requirements, involving 30 demand scenarios in 7 major fields, and began to collect solutions from the society; Henan Province has issued the "2023 Digital Transformation of Henan Province" Strategic Work Plan" to support Zhengzhou City in striving to become a national metaverse innovative application pilot zone.

As of now, nearly 40 provinces, cities and regions in China have released Metaverse industry development planning documents. In addition, more than 10 regions have established Metaverse related industry funds, with a total fund size of nearly 30 billion yuan. UBS (UBS) ) added the Metaverse to its long-term investment list last month.

The "retreat" of enterprises is mostly based on practical economic considerations, but the government's "advance" represents the future direction of the industry. Looking at a corner to get a glimpse of the whole picture, the potential and importance of the Yuanverse industry are self-evident.

On the other hand, judging from the Gartner technology maturity curve, the development of Metaverse technology is also in line with the overall trend.

In March 2021, taking advantage of the listing of Roblox, the concept of the metaverse exploded, causing the industry to overheat, and then began to cool down this year. When the popularity of the Metaverse drops to a relatively bottom position, the bubble will burst, and it will gradually start to climb from the trough, and the development of the industry will be more rational and healthy.

Because of this, some companies that truly insist on investing in the Metaverse have clearly emerged, and may lead the Metaverse to move forward healthily in their respective fields in the future.

For example, China Mobile Migu’s Gulangyu Yuanverse project provides users with digital life experiences such as cultural tourism, interactive entertainment, and consumer shopping, creating an autonomous and controllable, free exploration, instant interaction, and real-time online “Yuanverse”. "One Island"; as the virtual technical support for the 2023 Online Spring Festival Gala, NetEase Yaotai also successfully created the first metaverse venue for the Online Spring Festival Gala for CCTV. , bringing the audience a subversive party experience that combines reality and reality.

A global development research report released by Meta shows that by 2031, the development and popularization of the Yuanverse industry will contribute US$3.01 trillion to the global economy. And those real investors in the Metaverse after the bubble is gone will definitely be the biggest contributors and will also benefit from it.

In short, the relationship between AIGC, as a new content production method, and the Metaverse, as a new social form, currently seems to be one after another of "competition", but in fact it is a "symbiotic" relationship that complements each other. The maturity of AIGC will bring breakthrough opportunities to the Metaverse; and the healthy development of the Metaverse will provide unlimited scenarios for the implementation of AIGC.

Although due to the excessive market expectations and hype in the early stage, the Metaverse, which is still in the concept and prototype stage, is somewhat lacking in stamina, perhaps as Liu Bai, the head of NetEase Yaotai, once said: "The Metaverse is not cool, but Becoming more benign or rational must still be an important development direction of the Metaverse in the future."

On the day when the tide recedes, Yuanverse’s corporate valuation may gradually return.

*The pictures in this article are all from the Internet

The above is the detailed content of Breaking out of the zero-sum game, is AIGC the 'life reminder' or the 'life-sustaining pill' of the Metaverse?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!