From silent to sound, from black and white to color, from film to digital, movies have continuously reshaped artistic boundaries through technological iterations. Nowadays, virtual reality technology offers multi-dimensional interactive immersive experiences, making it possible for audiences to "step into" the parallel worlds constructed by films.

The National Film Bureau recently issued a "Notice on Promoting the Orderly Development of Virtual Reality Films," encouraging the exploration of virtual reality film technologies by all parties, improving the full-process supervision from script registration to public screening permits, and injecting standardized momentum into the industry by expanding virtual reality film screening spaces in theaters.

This year's government work report proposed to unleash the consumption potential of culture, tourism, and sports.

The metaverse, which integrates the digital and physical worlds, is unlocking new cultural tourism consumption scenarios one by one.

Shanghai has created a metaverse cultural tourism private board meeting, digitizing historical landmarks such as Yu Garden and the Bund. Tourists can "time-travel" to Republican-era street scenes through virtual reality (VR) technology; Gansu has developed an augmented reality (AR) tour system based on Dunhuang murals, allowing tourists to interact with flying apsaras murals by scanning codes; Beijing has seized the opportunity of the renovation and reconstruction of the Workers' Stadium to create the Workers' Stadium Metaverse Center, launching "Digital Football" and Workers' Stadium Metaverse live broadcasts, where tourists can transform into "digital goalkeepers" in the metaverse space and engage in penalty shootouts with international top star digital humans...

By reconstructing time and space through digital technology, transforming cultural and sports resources into interactive consumption assets, the metaverse is unleashing infinite potential in the cultural tourism industry.

Fig. 1: "Tang Palace Night Banquet" stage photo. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Li Jianan / Fig. 2: A girl using VR glasses. Photo provided by Visual China

At the first plenary session and opening ceremony of the Sixth Session of the Seventh Municipal People's Congress held on February 25th, several foreign consular officials were invited to attend. They listened to the meeting through simultaneous interpretation headphones. However, there were no human interpreters present; instead, four screens in front of the consular officials displayed the meeting content translated into English in real-time, shifting many consuls' attention from the printed reports to the screens.

Behind Li Fei-Fei's team's attempt to reduce model costs, breakthroughs in open-source, data, and technology are key elements.

Recently, it was reported that researchers from the team of Chinese-American scientist and "AI Godmother" Li Fei-Fei trained an s1 model comparable to DeepSeek-R1 for less than $50. According to sources, this s1 model was not trained from scratch but involved supervised fine-tuning based on Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model.

Li Fei-Fei's team's publicly available paper shows that after supervised fine-tuning of the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct language model, the resulting s1-32B model outperformed o1-preview in competition math problems by up to 27% (MATH and AIME24), achieving performance comparable to top-tier reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 in mathematics and coding capabilities. In this process, Li Fei-Fei's team primarily used a small dataset s1K containing 1,000 questions and their reasoning trajectories and developed budget forcing technology to extend model thinking, building a high-quality model at ultra-low cost.

How can the simplest method be used to expand model testing time (i.e., allowing AI models to think more before answering) and achieve strong reasoning performance? Behind Li Fei-Fei's team's attempt to reduce model costs, breakthroughs in open-source, data, and technology are key elements.

The metaverse has become a prominent focus in the digital realm, serving as a new carrier for technological innovation and cultural dissemination. It significantly expands digital living spaces, facilitates deep integration of technology and culture, and delivers unprecedented interactive experiences with infinite possibilities. With the release of the "Virtual Reality and Industry Application Integration Development Action Plan (2022-2026)", the deep integration of virtual reality technology with various industries has become an integral part of national strategy.

Amidst this technological wave, MarsX Digital Platform emerges as a pioneer in empowering cultural development through technology. Aligning with national policies and adhering to the philosophy of "utilizing and exploring cutting-edge technologies to materialize a comprehensive metaverse digital ecosystem," MarsX actively engages in innovative practices that integrate virtual reality technology with cultural industries, having achieved multiple digital scene innovations.

Since the release of DeepSeek-V3 and R1-Preview-Lite, which attracted the attention of the entire network, DeepSeek has released another blockbuster achievement.

On January 20, DeepSeek released a new open-source reasoning model DeepSeek-R1, which achieved a performance level comparable to OpenAI o1 in multiple tasks such as mathematics, programming and reasoning, while reducing the cost of calling the application programming interface (API) by 90-95%.

Source: DeepSeek

The future belongs to AI, and also to manufacturers and users who are more capable of using AI

The penetration of AI into the field of consumer electronics is still accelerating.

At this year's CES 2025, AI is still the core topic and main indicator of this international technology feast. In the exhibition areas of major brands, we can see all kinds of novel and fun AI+ consumer electronics products and solutions everywhere.

Of course, the discussion on AI this year seems to be more profound and comprehensive than in previous years. In addition to discussing what kind of products and applications AI can enable consumer electronics to land, more manufacturers are also paying attention to how to better use AI to empower the field of consumer electronics. The former focuses on "output" and the latter focuses on "input".

For example, in the exhibition areas of Tuya Smart, NVIDIA, AMD, and Amazon Web Services, we see that these well-known manufacturers are either consolidating the construction of underlying infrastructure, or taking the lead in building a more open large-scale model ecosystem, or directly opening up a one-stop AI development link, etc.

In December 2024, the domestic artificial intelligence sector market performed well, and the industry index rose 8.66% in the past month. This month, the AI ​​sector continued to rise sharply. On the one hand, Shanji released AI glasses, catalyzing the theme of AI glasses, and the sector performed well. From the industry perspective, next year will be the year for AI glasses to go from 0 to 1, and many manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Baidu and Samsung will release new products. On the other hand, ByteDance AI assistant Doubao became popular, driving Doubao AI-related concept stocks to rise sharply. At present, computing power is no longer a constraint on the AI ​​industry, and AI applications will usher in a great era of development in the future.

On December 20, OpenAI announced the launch of its next-generation model o3 and its streamlined version o3-mini on the last day of its 12-working day online new product launch event. o3 significantly surpasses its predecessor o1 in many aspects, excelling in software engineering, competitive mathematics, and the ability to master human PhD-level natural science knowledge. Especially in the ARC-AGI assessment, o3 achieved a score of 75.7% to 87.5%, exceeding the 85% threshold of human level.

Image source: Visual China

IT Home December 13 news, Meta announced on Thursday the launch of an artificial intelligence model called Meta Motivo, which is designed to control the actions of humanoid digital intelligent bodies to enhance the metaverse experience.

Meta also released AI tools such as the large concept model LCM and the video watermarking tool Video Seal, and reiterated its determination to continue investing in AI, AR and metaverse technologies.

[AI Era Introduction] Li Feifei’s World Labs’ first “spatial intelligence” model has just been born! A picture generates a 3D world. Netizens exclaimed: It’s crazy. We have entered the next round of revolution. This is the future of video games and movies.

On November 28, the "2024 Sohu Finance Annual Forum" was held in Beijing.

The Sohu Finance Annual Forum has grown into Sohu's annual brand event. Over the years, the forum has always adhered to a forward-looking vision, gathered wisdom and strength, and recorded and promoted every leap of China's economy.

This forum brought together more than 20 business elites and academic leaders. They sincerely took the pulse of the economic situation and discussed the world order; analyzed the real estate market structure and looked forward to investment opportunities in the capital market; focused on industrial innovation and market expansion under a global perspective, and offered suggestions for the sustainable development of enterprises.

With the rise of the concept of the metaverse, digital human technology has become the key to promoting the high-quality development of the digital economy. At the forum on the morning of November 28, Jiang Yahong, a national leading talent and founder and CEO of UStyle Times, gave a keynote speech - real 3D digital human are the "pass" to enter the metaverse.