Nvidia’s AI NPCs are no longer chatbots — they’re your new PUBG teammate

Nvidia has spent the last two years showing off its digital “ACE” characters that can have in-game conversations with you using generative AI. But at CES 2025, the company is taking the ACE characters a step further by showing how they can be “autonomous game characters” — including, sometime this year, a teammate to help you get a chicken dinner in PUBG.

Nvidia says that ACE characters can use AI to “perceive, plan, and act like human players,” per a blog post. “Powered by generative AI, ACE will enable living, dynamic game worlds with companions that comprehend and support player goals, and enemies that adapt dynamically to player tactics.” The characters are powered by “small language models (SLMs)” that are “capable of planning at human-like frequencies required for realistic decision making” as well as “multi-modal SLMs for vision and audio that allow AI characters to hear audio cues and perceive their environment.”

As for how that will work in PUBG, you’ll be able to team up with the “PUBG Ally,” which Nvidia and PUBG publisher Krafton are calling the “world’s first Co-Playable Character (CPC).” The Ally will be able to “communicate using game-specific lingo, provide real-time strategic recommendations, find and share loot, drive vehicles, and fight other human players using the game’s extensive arsenal of weapons,” Nvidia says.

Basically, it sounds like an AI teammate you can talk with natural language who’s supposed to be as capable as a human. And a video shows the Ally indeed helping a player find specific loot, bringing over a vehicle, and attempting to flank opposing players. But the video is heavily edited and isn’t live, so I’m skeptical that the Ally will work as well as is being shown here.

AI characters built with ACE are coming to other games, too. Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile PC Version will get a “a local inference AI Teammate feature” in March 2025, while Naraka: Bladepoint on PC will get the feature “later in 2025,” according to Nvidia’s blog post. “AI Teammates powered by NVIDIA ACE can join your party, battling alongside you, finding you specific items that you need, swapping gear, offering suggestions on skills to unlock, and making plays that’ll help you achieve victory.”

Krafton’s upcoming life simulation game called inZOI will also get CPCs called “Smart Zoi.” And Nvidia says that ACE characters can be bosses, too, and they’ll be used for boss encounters in Wemade Next’s MIR5.