Following the release of seven AI products last year, Meitu has now launched six new AI products at the Third Meitu Image Festival today, including ZCOOL design services, Qimi, and MOKI, further expanding the "AI family bucket." In contrast to the Sora route, MOKI focuses on AI short film creation and will officially launch in July.
AI technology has been rapidly developing in recent years, with new AI algorithms or models appearing every day. However, the application of AI is much slower than imagined, said Wu Xinhong, founder, chairman, and CEO of Meitu, with a sigh.
Following the launch of seven AI products last year, Meitu has released six new AI products, including Zcool design service, Qimi, and MOKI, further expanding the "AI family bucket" at the third Meitu Image Festival today.
Among them, Zcool design service is positioned as a platform that efficiently connects a large number of design demanders with millions of professional designers by providing a simple and efficient workflow; Qimi integrates Meitu's AI image technology and Ruishengtianhe's game marketing experience to provide efficient advertisement production and precise delivery for the game marketing industry; MOKI focuses on AI short film production, helping creators to create animation shorts, web novel dramas, story picture books, and MVs, making video creation simple and efficient.
At last year's Meitu Image Festival, Meitu's self-developed "Understanding Aesthetics" AI large model - Qixiang large model immediately received attention upon its release. Today, Wu Xinhong announced that the Qixiang large model has been upgraded to V5 and adopts Meitu's self-developed DiT technology architecture, which is also the same Transformer diffusion model architecture as Sora.
In February of this year, Wensheng Video Model Sora made a stunning appearance in the AI industry, leaving Wu Xinhong calling it a "shocking" innovation. After achieving quick internal consensus, Meitu immediately upgraded the technical architecture of Qixiang large model, from U-Net architecture to a stronger DiT architecture, while also upgrading the encoding and decoding technology, achieving synchronous compression of spatial and temporal domains.
Based on the underlying capabilities of the Qixiang large model, Meitu has launched an AI short film creation tool - MOKI. However, unlike the Sora route, MOKI focuses on AI short film creation.
After Sora was released, there has been a trend in the AI video field towards "roll duration". However, Wu Xinhong believes that the generated length is not the most core ability of the model. Controlability is more important, which is also a pain point that AI will face in the content creation and e-commerce design fields.
It is reported that MOKI has built an AI short film workflow from pre-setting to AI content generation and post-production, mainly based on subscription as the main business model, and will be officially launched on July 31.
Wu Xinhong admitted that catching up with Sora's technical capabilities and generation effects in the short term is a challenge, but it can gradually catch up over time. Meitu is not "hard to hard" on the model side, but finds the pain points of content creation on the application side, namely the difficulty of making story films. MOKI can integrate the capabilities needed by many original models and tools to solve current pain points in the content industry and form differentiated positioning.
"We believe that AI has a period of dividends. At least the next two years will be an excellent venture capital period for entering AI applications," said Wu Xinhong to Cailian Press. The help of AI to Meitu mainly reflects in the growth of income and users. Last year, Meitu's net income increased by 233% year-on-year, with a significant part of the reason being that AI brought better innovation, which can drive the simultaneous growth of revenue and users.
As of June 11th, Meitu's global VIP membership has reached 10.63 million, up from 7.19 million at last year's Meitu Image Festival.
Regarding future investment plans in AI, Wu Xinhong said that Meitu will remain restrained in investment in pure large model competition and make more rational investments that enhance the company's competitive strength. "Now we understand the importance of 'hematopoiesis' for a company, even in the stage where everyone is investing hot money, we are still very restrained, and we must have very clear scenarios and business models for everything, and we will no longer make relatively scattered large investments as before."
