Two major technology companies, Tencent and Alibaba, have simultaneously launched new world models. On April 16, Alibaba introduced its world model, Happy Oyster. Built on a native multimodal architecture, it supports multimodal understanding and joint audio-video generation. This allows users to build interactive, performable, and explorable AI digital worlds in real-time. The product can generate dynamic 3D environments and is applicable to scenarios like film production and game development.
On the same day, Tencent officially released and open-sourced its HY-World 2.0 mixed 3D world model. This multimodal world model can understand various inputs like text, images, and video, and automatically generate, reconstruct, and simulate 3D worlds. It also supports multi-format 3D asset exports and can seamlessly integrate with existing game development workflows for rapidly generating game maps and level prototypes.
Notably, on April 15, the latest rankings from WorldArena, an authoritative evaluation platform for world models, showed a model labeled as Alibaba's ABot-PhysWorld taking the top spot by a significant margin. This model, reportedly developed by Alibaba's Amap team, can accurately predict the motion trajectories of objects under complex interactions—such as sliding, tipping, stacking, and fluid changes—while maintaining consistency in multi-step causal logic.
The world model sector is also attracting significant capital inflow. On April 14, GigaVision, a prominent company in the field, announced the completion of a 15 billion yuan funding round, valuing the company at over 100 billion yuan. This follows a nearly 10 billion yuan Pre-B Series B round completed just a month prior. GigaVision's self-developed GigaWorld-1 world model topped the global rankings on the premier benchmark WorldArena, outperforming leading international institutions.
**A Key to AI's Perception of the World** **Two Sectors Poised for Early Benefits**
World models are a class of generative AI models capable of simulating real-world environments and generating videos or predicting future states based on multimodal inputs like text, images, video, and motion. Their core purpose is to overcome the limitations and "hallucinations" of traditional large language models, which "understand language but not physics, and can generate but not reason."
Currently, the world model industry has formed a complete industrial chain comprising "underlying infrastructure + technology platforms + scenario applications." The global market exhibits a competitive landscape where "Western giants dominate the foundational layer, while Chinese companies focus on applications." Multinational corporations like NVIDIA, Alphabet, and OpenAI control the underlying computing power and basic platforms, occupying a core position in the value chain. Domestic players, including ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, and Ant Group, have launched their own world model products, driving the technology from research to industrialization.
As the next strategic high ground in AI, world models can simulate physical rules, enable multimodal perception, and perform temporal prediction. Their applications span autonomous driving (virtual simulation, decision-making), embodied AI/robotics (action reasoning, virtual training), and also cover areas like gaming virtual worlds, industrial digital twins, low-altitude economy, and medical research.
China Post Securities indicated that the capabilities of world models are expected to continue evolving, providing sustained empowerment to the film and gaming sectors. Regarding gaming, the securities firm stated that the 3D world generation and interactive capabilities of world models align closely with the scene modeling and physics systems used in game production pipelines, making gaming a key area of industry exploration. As world model capabilities advance, their potential to enhance game content production efficiency, enable gameplay innovation, and facilitate virtual world construction is expected to be gradually realized.
**Gaming Sector Shows Movement**
Several A-share listed companies have already launched their own world models. In February 2025, Kunlun Tech launched its Matrix-Zero world model, which consists of two core sub-models: a 3D scene generation large model and an interactive video generation large model.
In March of this year, SoCent released its "Create·Myriad Forms" world physics model, focusing on digital world construction and the evolution of physical intelligence.
NavInfo stated in a research briefing that capabilities related to world models have gradually achieved closed-loop applications within its system, used for key modules like behavior prediction and trajectory generation, and are being productized for OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers.
In interactions with investors, UniStrong indicated that the company is developing key technologies including in-vehicle multi-sensor perception models, in-vehicle VLA large models, and cloud-based world models.
Benefiting from the new world model releases by Alibaba and Tencent, the A-share gaming sector showed significant movement on April 16. Perfect World hit the daily limit-up in the afternoon session and closed up over 7%. Xunyou Technology and Zhongqingbao closed up more than 5%, while Giant Network, Shiji Huatong, and Zhejiang Daily Digital Culture Group rose over 3%.
Among gaming concept stocks, nearly 20 have released 2025 performance data (including forecasts and preliminary results), with nine reporting year-on-year profit growth or a turnaround to profit.
Shiji Huatong led in performance growth, with the company expecting consolidated revenue of approximately 380 billion yuan for 2025, a year-on-year increase of about 68%. It forecasts net profit attributable to shareholders of between 5.55 billion and 6.98 billion yuan, representing growth of 357.47% to 475.34%. The company is reportedly the only overseas game company with leading products in two major gaming segments.
G-bits reported 2025 revenue of 6.205 billion yuan, up 67.89% year-on-year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 1.794 billion yuan, an increase of 89.82%. The company also issued a Q1 performance forecast, expecting net profit attributable to shareholders to grow between 59% and 87%.
From a capital perspective, seven gaming stocks have seen financing inflows exceeding 100 million yuan this year. Kingnet, Giant Network, Perfect World, and Shunwang Technology received additional financing of 701 million, 572 million, 387 million, and 305 million yuan, respectively.
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