Vivix Resurrects Kobe Bryant at a $1.3 Billion Valuation

"I Suggest They Rebuild OnlyFans"

Last week, in our article about Vision Plus Capital, we mentioned their signature deal: Vivix, which achieved a $1.32 billion valuation on nothing but a demo.

Not long after, Vivix — which fancies itself a real-time interactive multimodal model company — finally launched its first product, 7verse. Its main feature: real-time digital human interaction.

After spending an entire holiday playing with it, Luozima finds it rather amusing, because 7verse has essentially AI-ified every common form of digital junk food on the market.

We've also learned that Vivix plans to release additional products soon. For now, 7verse is only available as a web app (7verse.ai); the mobile app hasn't launched yet.

That said, we tried the app version two months ago, and it's practically identical to the current web version. The video generation quality leaves... considerable room for improvement 😴

Given that Vivix considers itself a model company rather than merely an application company, a lackluster debut product is forgivable. Here's hoping Liu Yu keeps at it and builds something better — Funeral AI will be first in line to put it through its paces 🫡

Now, Luozima's hands-on experience:

As a committed hedonist, I firmly believe only two kinds of AI products deserve to be called great:

1. Products that save labor time, allowing the masses to enjoy more digital junk food.
2. Better digital junk food.

For some reason, most of what the market has focused on — and what Funeral AI has tested — falls into the first category: AI coding, AI design, AI video, AI editing, AI office tools... The founders seem to have developed a Stockholm syndrome for work, forever training AI to help them cut costs and boost efficiency.

Why not cut to the chase, skip that whole productivity evolution step, and go straight to iterating on pleasure itself — with maximum leverage?

Glad to see Vivix thinks so too. They've built a product called 7verse that basically AI-ifies every common form of digital junk food out there.

First up: short video and livestreaming.

Open the 7verse homepage and you're greeted with countless livestream windows, each custom-made by users according to their personal kinks — including but not limited to: MrBeast, a Santa Claus with only a head, a blindfolded man tied to a bed, a hairless sheep, and Marilyn Monroe.

All waiting for you to connect.

I spotted a nun's confessional livestream, thought of that classic "nun and fish" meme, and clicked in.

Then I used Google Translate to translate and read aloud that iconic confession to the bionic nun, seeking cyber-God's forgiveness.

As you can see from the video, these AI streamers have one major flaw: they interrupt constantly.

I deliberately set my speech speed to 1.5x to signal that I wasn't finished, but she still cut me off repeatedly. The chat experience felt like being an electronics factory worker on a live call with Huzi.

This AI livestreaming is supposedly about virtual companionship — how's that companionship if I can't even finish a sentence? Real people, men or women, aren't this rude.

Later I tried something else: I had Doubao chat with her on full automation. The two AIs spent the entire session interrupting each other, eventually devolving into fragmented exchanges.

But beyond that, the language fluency and movement were within acceptable bounds — at least more human-like than those two new AI anchors Hunan TV just rolled out.

And as a user, you can generate your own livestream room with just a sentence or a photo. Want to connect and interact with someone? Anyone? Go ahead.

For example, I uploaded a photo of a character from a certain otome game, copy-pasted his background info from Baidu Baike, and shortly had his digital human generated.

Then following the prompts, I selected personality settings, life background, identity positioning, and speaking style — essentially a simple distillation process.

You can also upload voice samples for timbre cloning, adding extra realism.

But there's a bug: the generated character can actually speak Chinese, yet doesn't understand when you speak Chinese to him — like he skipped the HSK listening exam.

I specifically emphasized "this person only listens to and speaks Chinese" during generation. Didn't help.

So the final livestream effect was deeply uncanny:

Even from the sparse dialogue, it's clear that 7verse's characters mostly cycle through their programmed settings, repeating the same lines without any unexpected new material or wild cards — exactly what we're after.

So replacing real livestreamers or real otome games? Still early days.

For livestreaming, 7verse also built a feature called Video Linktree to help users generate rooms with one click: just upload a social media profile, and it instantly spawns their livestream room.

So I threw in Xianyu's Instagram link, to keep him alive in our hearts forever.

The result:

Maybe because I selected a Taiwanese-accented voice, the Sichuanese Xianyu spent the entire stream doing Sichuan opera face-changes, often looking like a Taiwanese person.

And though it seemed to have extracted all his Instagram content, what he said was hollow and tedious, barely related to his actual experiences.

I asked where he'd traveled, and he said many famous mountains and rivers, so on and so forth.

I asked what school he graduated from, and he said the University of Life. Whatever that means.

Most importantly, I asked him to take off his shirt and he refused. So it's just pure conversation? No dancing, singing, or borderline content?

That's livestreaming? That's digital junk food?

Later I imported Kobe Bryant's Instagram link, attempting resurrection, cyber-immortality.

Instead, 7verse browsed Kobe's social media, picked a photo of his daughter as the character image. A bit too unintelligent, perhaps?

When chatting with Kobe, I randomly selected several of his past posts to discuss.

Unfortunately, my man basically just narrated flatly, like reading an encyclopedia entry. Less emotional range than Doubao.

Asked him to perform some basketball moves — refused. Wanted to see what his jersey looked like from the back — brushed me off.

The only time he actually moved was when I sent three roses. Kobe, seeing money on the table, reached in from outside the screen to grab them.

Man, what can I say? Resurrection failed.

To summarize: 7verse's livestream rooms are essentially consumer-grade digital human generation.

But currently these digital humans struggle with speech and can't get movements right. Replacing entertainment livestreaming is still a stretch, and making money with it is basically impossible.

Moving on from livestreaming, let's talk short dramas and games.

7verse has a feature called Live Story: input one sentence and it generates a dynamic text adventure game.

I copied a cliché apocalyptic short drama title from the web: "In my past life I hoarded supplies for my parents, but in the extreme cold apocalypse they froze me to death and dismembered my body. Reborn, I bind to a safe house system!"

Shortly after, it auto-generated worldbuilding, protagonist info, and storylines. Didn't ask me for any additional input.

I thought it was pretty decent, so I published it straight away and played frantically for ten minutes:

After playing, I can only say: surprises and shocks in equal measure.

First, unlike other AI visual novel products, it doesn't pair you with a static image that only moves its lips. The visuals change continuously in real-time as the story progresses.

And beyond clicking the AI-provided options, players can type freely in the dialogue box to alter the story's direction.

For example, at one point my evil parents who abandoned me in my past life wanted to stay in my shelter. To drive them out, I typed directly into the box: "Pull out a machine gun and start spraying."

And the protagonist in the scene really did pull out a gun from somewhere and open fire. Subsequent plot developments all tied back to this machine gun spray somehow.

In the broadest sense, this is still an open-world game.

But the shocks were numerous.

Character consistency, scene plausibility — I won't even be demanding about those. Because browsing Hongguo, I found that even proper AI comic dramas can't manage these, and viewers are still smashing likes and binge-watching. Nobody cares.

But beyond that, plenty was still hard to swallow.

For instance, whether narrator or character voices, they all carried a robotic accent somewhere between Hunan and Fujian — intensely uncanny valley.

And these real-time generated visuals sometimes just hard-stitched together whatever elements appeared in the story.

Later I tried imitating the trendiest AI fruit drama series, generating a love triangle game between Strawberry, Yogurt, and Chocolate.

Strawberry girl and Yogurt guy were the original couple, but she got involved with Chocolate guy too, and finally Yogurt guy prepared to put them all in a blender for an apocalyptic judgment...

This time I discovered that beyond the aforementioned issues, the visuals also frequently featured random intruding anime avatars.

Pretty abstract.

Overall, while 7verse's features currently feel like experimental prototypes, I still found myself rather satisfied.

First, going by the self-definitions of numerous companies in our previous article, Vivix's real-time interactive video technology qualifies as a so-called "world model" — making 7verse the first agent of this type I've seen with any apparent practical value.

Not that they've ever marketed it as such.

Second, 7verse looks terrible now, but it's a digital junk food product. Many concepts that don't fly in productivity tools sail smoothly here.

Because the error tolerance is high. The masses are remarkably forgiving of digital junk food products — we spend our days watching gutter content on Douyin and Kuaishou, watching Big Stomach Liangzi and Russian Nana in livestreams, never once considering whether this stuff's image quality or information density meets our brain's needs.

So distilling a colleague probably won't replace your work, because the information input is too limited. But distill a dancing streamer, and old men will genuinely watch for three hours straight, because the required output isn't much either.

A smooth brain needs no wrinkles. Digital junk food, truly great.

But one final question remains.

With internet content now so cheap to produce, streamers and creators so abundant, short dramas and games so free and the categories so comprehensive — why would netizens specifically seek out AI digital human content?

7verse's pitch is: when you're already a well-known creator, your digital doppelgänger can keep extracting your own surplus value after you go offline, earning a few extra pennies is still earning.

Somewhat reasonable, but logically speaking, a fan who isn't at the parasocial-attachment level has no real reason to talk into the void at an idol who can't see them, sending flowers and beers — because they gain no tangible benefit from it. If they have spare cash, better to wait for the real person to go live.

Unless what's operating here isn't fan economy logic but commodity economy logic — say, you pay less for a slightly lower-quality video call experience. Not a real person, a digital human, but the end result is similar.

Yes, I'm talking about OnlyFans. I suggest 7verse eventually push in the NSFW direction, rebuild OnlyFans from scratch. You got this 🦾

(This article's cover image was generated by ChatGPT; purely human-written)

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