China self-driving truck company TuSimple pivots to genAI for games

Embattled Chinese autonomous trucking company TuSimple has rebranded to CreateAI, focusing on video games and animation, the company announced Thursday.

The news comes as GM folded its Cruise robotaxi business this month, and the once-hot sector of self-driving startups has started to weed out stragglers. TuSimple, which straddled the U.S. and China markets, had its own challenges: concerns over vehicle safety, a $189 million settlement of a securities fraud lawsuit and delisting from the Nasdaq in February.

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

That’s thanks to a video game based on the hit martial arts novels by Jin Yong that’s slated to release an initial version that year, Cheng said. He anticipates “several hundred million” in revenue in 2027 when the full version is launched.

Before the delisting, TuSimple said it lost $500,000 in the first three quarters of 2023, and spent $164.4 million on research and development during that time.

Company co-founder Mo Chen has a “long history” with the Jin Yong family and started work in 2021 to develop an animated feature based on the stories, Cheng said.

The company claims its artificial intelligence capabilities in developing autonomous driving software give it a base from which to develop generative AI. That’s the next-level tech powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts.

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

“It’s clear our shareholders see the value in this transformation and want to move forward in this direction,” Cheng said. “Our management team and Board of Directors have received overwhelming support from shareholders at the annual meeting.”

He said the company plans to increase headcount to around 500 next year, up from 300.

While still under the name TuSimple, the company in August announced a partnership with Shanghai Three Body Animation to develop the first animated feature film and video game

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 expects to lower the cost of top-tier, so-called 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 gaming giant Tencent.

When asked about the impact of U.S. restrictions, Cheng claimed there were no issues and said the company used a mix of China and non-China cloud computing providers.

The U.S. under the Biden administration has ramped up limits on Chinese businesses’ access to advanced semiconductors used to power generative AI.