PUBG Ally Duo brings genAI teammates to PUBG: Battlegrounds — and Krafton is also building military bots

Krafton has launched PUBG Ally Duo in open beta, dropping a generative AI teammate into PUBG: Battlegrounds that can talk, plan, and fight alongside you. The beta is live now and runs until June 30, accessible through Ally Duo Mode in PUBG Arcade.

Under the hood, PUBG Ally runs on Nvidia ACE and splits its brain into two systems. A traditional behavior tree handles the fast stuff — movement, aiming, immediate combat reactions. Nvidia ACE then handles the cognitive layer, running three models locally on RTX GPUs with at least 8GB of VRAM: Nvidia's Parakeet speech-to-text model for real-time English voice commands, the Mistral-Nemo-Minitron 2-billion-parameter small language model for situational reasoning and responses, and a custom Krafton text-to-speech model for voice output. Everything runs locally, on-device, to keep latency low. Krafton says the beta exists specifically to gather real-world player feedback and shape where AI agents go next in games.

The context here is hard to ignore. Krafton has been aggressively investing in generative AI across its business, and that includes a partnership with a South Korean defense company — one connected to the U.S. Navy — to develop unpiloted robot weapon systems. Krafton's stated contribution to that project is its expertise in large-scale game data and physics-based virtual worlds. So the same technology stack powering your new Plunkbat squadmate is, at least in part, feeding into autonomous military hardware research.

For PUBG specifically, the AI teammate angle is a genuine shift for a game whose identity has always been built around chaotic human voice chat. Whether a 2B-parameter language model can replicate that energy is another question entirely — but Krafton clearly wants to find out before June 30.