Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1536119
of the things that made it stand out among the other submissions was that ML [machine learning] was employed judiciously. This was when everyone was talking about ML, before they were even talking about AI or GenAI. The approach sort of swam upstream so to speak, and we had to resubmit actually, because we were told that we were editing results—that there was no way what we were showing was possible. Big players were already at the door, but it was CDPR in Poland who said, "Not only is this impressive, but it's a clearly defined pro- totype." Pif and Chris really vibed with them, and they were far and away the best choice. CDPR said, "We need this now and we can see it already works, so we'll pay you to develop it. Then when we release the game, we want to talk about this relationship and us finding you [JALI]…We [CDPR] want that to be part of our story when we pro- mote the game with the whole build-up, and then go sell it to the world aer that. We don't want any interest in it or rights, or anything like that." That development process [for Cyberpunk 2077] took a long time. It was an exclusive relationship for the period until they released the game—that was the exchange. It was a pretty amazing and singular kind of relationship. Very hard to replicate. It was amazing, and they were very generous with their time and with their belief that we were actually a competent product development team. Pif has always been very product-oriented and Chris had the legacy accolades as an Academy Award winner, and deep knowledge of Maya at the rig- ging level and the animation level. I'd say Chris probably knows more about it than many people working today. How did the name "JALI Research" originate? Sarah Watling: It's a contraction that represents the two dynamic modes that are at the core of the original technology. If you imagine this on an XY-plane, it's motion that is happening in the jaw space and motion that's happening in the lip space. Jaw-lip, JA-LI [pro- nounced "jaw-lee"]. So that's where it comes from, and that was the name of the paper. Then the four co-founders started internally calling themselves "JALI Goodfellows," so that kind of stuck. When I was at Gamescom, I met this guy who was regaling me about his 30-some-hour trek from Botswana. He was part of an Afri- can delegation of people in advocacy roles for animation as a growth opportunity in a young demographic. He was telling me that where he's from there's a mountain called Mount Jali, and the word in his culture means "elevated perspective." Isn't that beautiful? Can you tell us more about JALI's technology and how it has evolved to where it is now? Sarah Watling: When we first started developing the earliest iter- ations of the technology, it was a solution to automatically create animated 3D faces from audio analysis that could be described as fast, accurate, in-sync, and expressive. These were the sort of things that we were always striving to hit. Low processing footprint—fast, not just in terms of time to generate, but also in terms of total com- pute time. A tiny component of an overall game pipeline or produc- tion pipeline. Because we had Chris and this OG Maya crew on our team, we a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 5 c g w 1 7 VIDEO: JALI Research / Don't Nod Montreal Partnership Cyberpunk 2077, developed by CD Projekt Red Rise of the Ronin, developed by Koei Tecmo's Team Ninja