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- Events
Dear Legend Hunters,
We are proud to offer you the English translation of an authoritative news report from Sina Esports (China) written by Luo Hao, dated March 31, 2026, at 9:41 AM:
From Utility-AI to JEPA: Legend Battles Attempts to Rewrite the "Intelligent Foundation" of Game NPCs
**Anchoring at the Technological Frontier, Reshaping the Paradigm of Game AI Development**
On February 28, 2026, the "Gathering Intelligence for the Future" — "Sci-Fi +" Integrated Development Forum, part of the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum & China Science Fiction Convention, was successfully held at Shougang Park. Hosted by the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, the Administrative Committee of Zhongguancun Science Park, the People's Government of Shijingshan District, and Shougang Group Co., Ltd., and organized by the Beijing Digital Creative Industry Association, the event brought together top global science fiction creators, scientists, industry leaders, and ecosystem partners. Focusing on the deep integration of science fiction with cutting-edge fields—such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, aerospace technology, and cultural creativity—the forum emerged as a landmark event leading cross-disciplinary innovation in the global"Sci-Fi + Technology" landscape.
Eric MERGY—AI Advisor for the French Government's "Smart City" initiative, former Vice President at SAP, co-founder of a global multilingual electronic navigation mapping service with 50 million downloads, and CTO & founder of Hanxiang Technology (Legend Battles app on Steam)—was invited to attend and deliver a keynote speech titled"From Utility-AI to JEPA: Endowing Game NPCs with a Sense of Real Life."Approaching the subject from three dimensions—technological evolution, industry practice, and future trends—he systematically analyzed the developmental trajectory of next-generation game AI. Concurrently, he showcased the cutting-edge achievements of the company's flagship Battle Royale title, *Legend Battles* (Chinese title: *Ni Jing Tu Po*), thereby offering an international perspective and a technical roadmap for the industrialization of science fiction gaming in China.
In his speech, Eric MERGY pointed out that the majority of mainstream game NPCs today are built upon Utility-AI. The core logic of this approach drives behavioral decision-making through mechanisms based on "need scoring" and "instant response." Over the past decade or so, this paradigm has effectively supported the increasing complexity of game interactions; however, as the scale of open worlds continues to expand and player expectations for immersive experiences rise, its limitations are becoming increasingly apparent. These limitations include a lack of deep environmental understanding, insufficient long-term planning capabilities, highly predictable behavioral patterns, and significantly escalating computational costs within large-scale systems. Eric stated, "Mainstream Utility AI remains, at its core, a rule-driven system—one ill-equipped to support the immersive, future-oriented open worlds of tomorrow. Game AI must evolve from mere 'reactive mechanisms' into 'cognitive systems'—shifting its focus from simply executing logic to truly understanding the world."
** Legend Battles vast hyper-realistic world video on stage **
To address this critical technical bottleneck, Eric MERGY highlighted the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) —a concept originally proposed by Turing Award laureate Yann LeCun—during his presentation. As a novel self-supervised learning framework, JEPA constructs a "world model" to predict environmental structures and trends within a latent space, thereby endowing AI agents with the capacity to understand and reason about complex systems. Unlike mainstream generative AI models, JEPA does not rely on the direct generation of images or text; instead, it focuses on learning abstract structures and modeling causal relationships, thereby enabling more efficient and highly generalizable intelligent decision-making mechanisms. Eric emphasized, "The core of JEPA lies in understanding, not generation. It equips NPCs with long-term memory, environmental awareness, and predictive behavioral capabilities —serving as a pivotal technical foundation for
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