Generative Artificial Intelligence(GAI)has become one of the cutting-edge technologies in Artificial Intelligence(AI),and is considered as an important step towards Artificial General Intelligence(AGI).This paper makes a comprehensive survey of the main development trends in the field of GAI.Firstly,the development trends of GAI are reviewed;Secondly,its further development directions are summarized;Finally,the potential military applications of GAI are explored.This survey shows that multimodality and interpretability are currently the key directions of GAI;GAI is now accelerating the breakthroughs in domains of robots that emphasize instruction comprehension and reasoning,as well as basic science that emphasizes inductive reasoning;lightweight GAI for end-users and open-source GAI for developers have become popular trends;and the supervision of the application of GAI is also urgent.This survey believes that deep integration of multimodality,construction of high-quality data resources and evaluation methods,autonomous interaction with the environment,low-cost application deployment at the edge,and balancing technological development with regulatory governance,will be important directions for the future development of GAI.