Advancing AI Empowerment in the Entertainment Industry
HONG KONG, April 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Zhipu, a leading Chinese artificial intelligence company (Beijing Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Company Limited.), and BYOND ASIA (Hong Kong), a Dubai-based pioneer in hyper-realistic digital human technology, today announced their strategic partnership in Hong Kong. The two partners also unveiled Hong Kong’s first interactive celebrity digital avatar—AI Mr. Eric Tsang—marking the beginning of a new era in the film and entertainment industry with “AI + Next Generation Hyper-Realistic Digital Humans.”
Zhipu shared its vision for building an AI innovation ecosystem in Hong Kong, highlighting its successful applications across various industries and discussing how these experiences can be replicated in Hong Kong to drive the intelligent transformation of media and entertainment sector in the territory. The partnership signifies the first deep integration of Zhipu’s cutting-edge AI technology with Hong Kong’s creative industry.
Groundbreaking Interactive Experience
Through the collaboration between BYOND ASIA and ZHIPU, Mr. Eric Tsang’s digital twin is now multi-lingual, speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and more—positioning him as a global cultural ambassador capable of engaging fans worldwide and driving international IP monetization. This new digital avatar achieves three major technological breakthroughs:
- Two-Way Interactive Dialogue: A system trained via deep learning on Mr. Eric Tsang’s personal traits enables natural and seamless real-time conversations.
- Holographic Replication Technology: Combination of ultra-realistic imaging and voice simulation to perfectly replicate Mr. Eric Tsang’s appearance and distinctive style.
- Contextual Awareness: Capability of displaying corresponding facial expressions and body language based on dialogue content.
“This is not just a technological breakthrough but a revolution for the entertainment industry,” said Mr. Eric Tsang after experiencing his digital avatar firsthand. “My digital counterpart transcends time and space, offering audiences a completely new interactive experience.”
The collaboration integrates Zhipu’s cognitive intelligence technology with BYOND ASIA (Hong Kong)’s hyper-realistic digital human engine. The two companies plan to focus on future developments in:
- Innovative advancements in celebrity digital IP operations
- AI-assisted film and television production solutions
- Automated scriptwriting
- Virtual content creation
- Cross-dimensional entertainment experiences
Zhipu also showcased its latest products, including:
- AutoGLM-Rumination: The world’s first Agent combining deep research with practical operational capabilities. This represents a significant advancement in autonomous agent technology and an upgrade to device-control agents. AutoGLM-Rumination leverages multimodal large model capabilities to efficiently process text, images, and speech, providing intelligent solutions for complex tasks.
- CogView4: The first open-source text-to-image model supporting Chinese character generation. CogView4 ranks first in the DPG-Bench benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among open-source text-to-image models. It is also the first image-generation model compliant with the Apache 2.0 license. Its multimodal capabilities further expand AI’s applications in creative content generation.
About Zhipu
Founded in 2019, Zhipu is driven by the vision of “making machines think like humans.” The company has developed the GLM,pre-training large language framework with independent intellectual property rights. Its latest base model, GLM-4-Plus, rivals the world’s most advanced models. In the critical field of AI Agents—a key pathway to AGI—Zhipu holds a distinct advantage. It pioneered the Phone Use concept ahead of OpenAI and launched Agent products, collaborating with global automotive, PC, and smartphone manufacturers through AutoGLM and GLM-PC to advance large models from Chat to Act. Guided by the Model as a Service (MaaS) philosophy, Zhipu’s open platform, bigmodel.cn, continues to drive AI innovation across industries, fostering a thriving AI ecosystem.
Website: https://www.zhipuai.cn/
About BYOND ASIA
Pioneering the Future of Digital Humans, BYOND ASIA is a leading AI company specializing in hyper-realistic digital human technology, dedicated to improving quality of life across industries. With exclusive licensing of core AI technology from Korea’s Klleon and support from WebTVAsia’s media influence in Asia, BYOND creates intelligent digital counterparts of celebrities, educators, and service providers for applications in education, healthcare, elderly companionship, retail, and entertainment. Its solutions have been successfully deployed in Malaysia and the Middle East, with multiple celebrity digital avatars already created. The company is now expanding its presence in Hong Kong and mainland China. Through proprietary AI systems, large language models (LLMs), and the HoloMe physical interaction platform, BYOND ASIA is leading the next wave of AI transformation, committed to merging technology with humanity.
In 2025, BYOND officially established its Hong Kong subsidiary (BYOND Hong Kong) as a key hub for its expansion across Asia. Website: https://byond.asia/
