Olympic AI Model Leads Dual-Speed Tech Revolution

The AI Pivot: From Olympic Arenas to Digital Screens, Technology Reshapes Experiences and Economics

In a landmark move for both sports and technology, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has unveiled the first official Olympic AI model, built on Alibaba's Qwen, signaling a profound shift towards intelligent operations for global mega-events. Meanwhile, across the content industry, generative AI is demonstrating a dual-speed impact, rapidly birthing entirely new formats like "AI-manhua" while steadily, if less revolutionarily, optimizing legacy sectors such as gaming.

A New Chapter for the Games: The Olympic AI Model Debuts at Milan-Cortina

The upcoming Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics is poised to be remembered not only for athletic feats but as a watershed moment for technological integration in global sports. On February 5th, IOC President Kirsty Coventry announced the launch of the Olympic Movement's first official large language model, developed in partnership with Chinese tech giant Alibaba Cloud and powered by its Qwen model.

President Coventry hailed the move as transformative, stating that supported by the Qwen model, the Milan-Cortina Games would showcase an intelligent future for the Olympic Movement, aiming to be the "smartest" Games in history. The deployment focuses on two parallel tracks: professional Games operations and global fan engagement.

For the professional side, the IOC has integrated a "National Olympic Committee AI Assistant" into its dedicated website for team officials. This tool, leveraging Qwen's multilingual capabilities and trained on millions of words of official documentation, allows delegation members to ask complex questions in their native language—ranging from qualification procedures to logistical scheduling—and receive precise answers. This innovation is designed to dismantle language barriers and significantly enhance coordination efficiency for the over 200 participating delegations.

For the public, an "Olympic AI Assistant" will be launched on Olympics.com. This interface will allow global fans to receive real-time, accurate answers to queries about competition rules, athlete profiles, and Olympic history, using conversational AI to democratize access to the vast knowledge base of the Games.

The collaboration with Alibaba, a Worldwide Olympic Partner since 2017, has evolved significantly. Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), recounted how the partnership was pivotal in solving a critical scaling problem for broadcast operations nearly a decade ago. OBS's strategic shift to IP-based and cloud-native technology, pioneered with Alibaba, has been validated. Exarchos outlined OBS's "3E" principle, enabled by Alibaba's technology stack:

• Enablement: The Alibaba-powered "OBS Cloud" allows broadcasters to produce content remotely, a crucial advantage for the geographically dispersed Milan-Cortina venues, eliminating the need to transport all signals back to home countries.
• Engagement: AI-driven features like 360-degree replay, enhanced with new "time-slice" effects for 2026, and the integration of real-time competition data are deployed to create more immersive viewing experiences.
• Efficiencies: Collaboration on an Automated Media Description (AMD) system, built on Qwen's multimodal models, can swiftly identify athletes and key scenes within the expected 6,000 hours of OBS-produced content (six times the actual competition time), enabling broadcasters to manage and archive footage efficiently.

Ilario Corna, IOC Chief Information Technology Officer, detailed further applications, including an upgraded search function for the Olympic archival footage library. Using Qwen's natural language processing, fans can now find specific video moments through descriptive queries with near-instant, precise results. Behind the scenes, AI models also power the Games' transportation and energy management systems, optimizing logistics and monitoring venue energy consumption in real-time.

Fei-Fei Li, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group and President of International Business, emphasized that Qwen, one of the world's most popular open-source models with over 10 billion downloads on Hugging Face, forms the core of this Olympic AI ecosystem. The tailored "Olympic model" can answer queries, generate multimedia competition summaries, and facilitate interaction, serving coaches, athletes, and fans alike.

Content Industry at an AI Crossroads: Radical Birth vs. Evolutionary Change

While AI is being institutionalized at the Olympic level, its impact on the broader content industry reveals a tale of two speeds: the meteoric rise of new AI-native formats and the incremental, efficiency-focused adoption in established ones.

The most explosive growth is seen in "AI-manhua" (AI漫画剧), a hybrid format born from short-form drama but presented as animated comic strips. Industry experts agree its very existence is predicated on advances in generative AI video models. "The emergence of AI-manhua is essentially due to technological breakthroughs, not a transformation of the content industry itself," noted Xue Ye, head of the manhua division at China Literature.

The development trajectory has been breathtakingly fast. Huang Haonan, founder of酱油文化 (Jiangyou Culture), stated, "AI-manhua has developed ten times faster than short-form dramas." From a non-existent concept in January 2025, the industry reached a production boom by July, with a current daily output of 300-500 titles—rivaling the annual output of traditional animation studios. Huang predicts daily new releases will exceed 1,000 by the first half of 2026, leading to intense market competition.

The driving forces are lower barriers to entry, reduced costs, and vastly improved efficiency. The launch of models like Kling (可灵) by Kuaishou in mid-2024 significantly boosted the quality and volume of AI-generated video, fueling the sector's expansion. The industry is now accelerating toward premium content, with stakeholders anticipating a breakout,国民级 (nationwide hit), title in 2026.

Looking ahead,出海 (going global) is seen as an inevitable and promising path. "AI-powered manhua has more advantages for overseas expansion than traditional live-action short dramas because of its lower trial-and-error cost and smaller cultural barriers," Xue Ye explained. Huang Haonan added, "Japanese anime has already proven to the world that animation has no national borders."

In stark contrast, the gaming industry's relationship with AI in 2025 has been characterized more by pragmatic integration than revolutionary upheaval. Earlier expectations for rapidly emerging "AI-native games"—featuring completely dynamic narratives and environments—have been tempered. "If the impact of AI on short dramas has 'exceeded expectations,' then its impact on games has been 'below expectations'," the industry analysis noted.

Data from gaming outlet "Game Gyro" showed that titles on Steam explicitly using generative AI tools rose from 7,818 in July to over 10,000 by December 2025, still only about 8% of the platform's total library.

For major game studios, the focus has been squarely on tangible efficiency gains and enhancing existing operations. Wang Chuanpeng, VP of Technology Center Data at 37 Interactive Entertainment, described the shift from experimentation in 2024 to setting clear KPIs for AI integration in 2025, moving from proof-of-concept to systematic implementation. Wen Yuanxu, product and operations lead for Kling AI, observed that AI application in games remains primarily in the realm of "cost reduction and efficiency increase," especially in art, audio, and localization—a valuable, if less glamorous, path to adoption.

Zou Jiaxuan, producer of Justice Online (逆水寒手游) at NetEase, acknowledged the industry is awaiting a "ChatGPT moment" for gaming but expects it to be preceded by numerous smaller breakthroughs in content innovation and production. In the interim, faced with a saturated market, extending the lifecycle of existing blockbuster titles through sophisticated IP operation has become a critical strategy. "When a game evolves from mere playability to encompassing content and even artistic attributes, developing an IP becomes a natural step," remarked Zhuang Minghao, VP of趣丸网络 (Qutu Network).

Convergence on a Pragmatic Path

The narrative emerging from the Olympic workshops and the content studios converges on a theme of pragmatic, large-scale implementation. The IOC's deployment of its official AI model represents a mature, systematic application of technology to solve concrete, large-scale problems in logistics, broadcasting, and fan engagement.

Similarly, in content, the initial fever-dream of AI as a purely disruptive, genre-creating force is giving way to a more nuanced reality. While it has indeed spawned a vibrant new format in AI-manhua, its broader influence is one of augmentation and optimization. The technology is being woven into the fabric of existing industries, from speeding up game asset creation to managing Olympic transportation flows, proving that its most immediate and profound impact may lie not in sudden revolution, but in steady, pervasive enhancement.

As the Milan-Cortina Games prepare to showcase this integrated AI future on a global stage, and as content creators harness the same tools to both invent and refine, the message is clear: the age of AI experimentation is maturing into an era of strategic, solution-oriented deployment.