ai in gaming

Our 150th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai

Timestamps + links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:02:49) OpenAI’s custom GPT Store is now open for business
  • (00:06:52) OpenAI debuts ChatGPT subscription aimed at small teams
  • Lighting round
    • (00:09:18) The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you
    • (00:11:18) Amazon’s Alexa gets new generative AI-powered experiences
    • (00:12:55) Google appears to be working on an ‘advanced’ version of Bard that you have to pay for
• Applications & Business
  • (00:14:24) Nvidia's newest chips are designed to run AI at home as competition from Intel, AMD looms
  • (00:16:52) Valve opens the door to more Steam games developed with AI
  • Lighting round
    • (00:19:16) AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI, now valued at $520M, raises $73.6M
    • (00:21:33) Waymo will start testing robotaxis on Phoenix highways
    • (00:23:24) Getty and Nvidia bring generative AI to stock photos
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:25:10) DeepMind is trying to train robots for real-world activities
  • (00:29:03) MoE-Mamba: Efficient Selective State Space Models with Mixture of Experts
  • Lighting round
    • (00:33:18) PIXART-δ: Fast and Controllable Image Generation with Latent Consistency Models
    • (00:35:20)  InseRF: Text-Driven Generative Object Insertion in Neural 3D Scenes
    • (00:37:06) The Impact of Reasoning Step Length on Large Language Models
    • (00:39:33) Mixtral of Experts
• Policy & Safety
  • (00:40:38) Meta and OpenAI have spawned a wave of AI sex companions—and some of them are children
  • (00:46:30) ‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says
  • Lighting round
    • (00:49:52) Judges in England and Wales are given cautious approval to use AI in writing legal opinions
    • (00:51:43) Hallucinating Law: Legal Mistakes with Large Language Models are Pervasive
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (00:55:09) A list going viral reveals famous artists whose work was used to train AI generator
  • (00:58:28) YouTube is cracking down on AI-generated true crime deepfakes
  • Lighting round
    • (01:00:27) AI-Generated George Carlin Comedy Special Slammed by Comedian’s Daughter
    • (01:01:56) SAG-AFTRA Signs Deal With Voiceover Studio for AI Use in Video Games
    • (01:03:26) Early Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain—and AI is already on the case

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Today’s show:

Convai CEO Purnendu Mukherjee joins Jason to discuss creating AI-powered NPCs using Convai (6:05), the birth of generative AI (22:17), open-source vs. closed AI (36:01), and much more!

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Time stamps:

(0:00) Convai CEO Purnendu Mukherjee joins Jason

(3:54) The motivation behind Convai

(6:05) Purnendu breaks down creating an NPC character using Convai

(10:16) Equinix - Join the Equinix Startup Program for up to $100K in credits and much more at https://equinixstartups.com

(11:36) Demo of character creation using Convai's unique toolset

(17:18) Integrating AI Characters into Game Worlds with Convai

(20:50) Fitbod - Get 25% off at https://fitbod.me/twist

(22:17) Convai’s business model and the issue game developers have with moving from flat rate to usage-based charges

(25:00) Purnendu reflects on his time at Nvidia

(29:57) The birth of the generative AI boom

(34:30) LinkedIn Marketing - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups

(36:01) Navigating the Future: AI Regulation & open-source vs. closed AI

(40:11) The countdown to self-creating AI

(43:13) Purnendu breaks down data collected for AI and the uses for an AI-enabled Amazon Mechanical Turk

Check out Convai: https://www.convai.com

Follow Purnendu:

https://twitter.com/purn3ndu

https://www.linkedin.com/in/purn3ndu

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Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

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Roblox cofounder and CEO David Baszucki and a16z's Jonathan Lai discuss the ways AI is changing games and virtual worlds, as well as how we create them. 

• [1:00] Generative AI in games
• [4:56] Fully personalized playthroughs
• [7:50] Roblox's generative model
• [11:28] Future of interfaces
• [13:25] impact on creators
• [16:36] NPCs as copilots
• [18:49] VR & spatial computing

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Our 125th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

Email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai

Timestamps:

• (00:00) Intro / Banter
• (02:33) Response to listener comments / corrections
• (05:30) News Preview
• Tools & Apps
  • (06:21) A.I. May Help Design Your Favorite Video Game Character
  • (12:16) Watch this Nvidia demo and imagine actually speaking to AI game characters + Nvidia unveils Avatar Cloud Engine for Games at Computex
  • (15:27) JPMorgan is developing a ChatGPT-like A.I. service that gives investment advice
  • (16:40) TikTok is testing an AI chatbot called Tako
  • (18:32) Zoo, a playground for text to image models
• Applications & Business
  • (20:10) Insights from American Workers: A Comprehensive Survey on AI in the Workplace
  • (24:29) The A.I. chip boom is pushing Nvidia toward $1 trillion, but it won't help Intel and AMD
  • (29:12) Hoffman and Suleyman's AI startup Inflection launches ChatGPT-like chatbot
  • (31:31) Eating Disorder Helpline Fires Staff, Transitions to Chatbot After Unionization
  • (33:51) AI startup Figure raises $70 million to build humanoid robots
• Projects & Open Source
  • (35:21) PandaGPT: One Model to Instruction-Follow Them All
  • (41:50) Uncensored Models
  • (47:30) Guanaco
  • (50:50) 🦍 Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs
  • (52:17) BLOOMChat: a New Open Multilingual Chat LLM
  • (53:27) GirlfriendGPT - Your personal AI companion
• Research & Advancements
  • (55:45) Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
  • (01:02:55) A Pretrainer's Guide to Training Data: Measuring the Effects of Data Age, Domain Coverage, Quality, & Toxicity
  • (01:07:33) RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era
  • (01:09:35) Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations
  • (01:11:12)  Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning
• Policy & Safety 
  • (01:14:43) PM meeting with leading CEOs in AI: 24 May 2023
  • (01:18:05) An early warning system for novel AI risks
  • [3 min] Lighting Round
    • (01:22:07) How Rogue AIs may Arise
    • (01:24:30) Democratic Inputs to AI
    • (01:26:20) Top AI researchers and CEOs warn against ‘risk of extinction’ in 22-word statement
    • (01:29:30) Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:31:48) Grimes Invited Anyone to Make A.I. Grimes Songs. Here Are Her Reviews. + I used Grimes’ AI vocals to make a hit – here’s how I did it
  • (01:34:27) As a lifelong Beatles fan, this AI-generated Beatles music is blowing my mind
• (01:36:00) Outro

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk bring on special guest Casey Newton (Platformer, The Verge, Hard Fork) to talk about the generative AI craze that's sweeping the land. Artificial intelligence: what even is it? How did it become such a popular trend? And what does it all mean for video games?

One More Thing: 

Kirk: Nope (2022)

Maddy: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

Jason: Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro by Dean Nelson

Links: 

Casey Newton’s newsletter, Platformer, and his podcast, Hard Fork

Kevin Roose’s unsettling encounter with Bing/Sydney: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html

Triple Click LIVE IN BROOKLYN, May 18th: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/triple-click-live-tickets-513213584647

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Join the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpod

Triple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/

What will the year bring? Time for some guesses! It's the episode you've all been waiting for... Jason, Kirk, and Maddy go through their predictions from 2022 to see who won the annual bet and whose game we'll all play. Then, the gang whips out some hot new predictions for 2023. 

One More Thing: 

Kirk: Defunctland’s “Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery”

Maddy: Metroid Prime on Steam Deck

Jason: The Man Who Died Twice (Richard Osman)

Links:

Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_rjBWmc1iQ

Metroid Prime on Steam Deck: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/25/23518873/metroid-prime-trilogy-valve-steam-deck-primehack-emudeck-emulation

Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/join

Buy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=last

Join the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpod

Triple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/

PREDICTIONS

KIRK

1. Microsoft will not own Activision/Blizzard at the end of 2023
2. Nintendo will announce a Legend of Zelda movie
3. Someone will announce a game that is being written by an AI
4. Gabe Newell will retire from Valve
5. Amazon will buy Roblox
6. House House will announce a sequel to Untitled Goose Game it will feature both a goose and another animal
7. Two games will include a menu toggle for NPC puzzle suggestions
8. There'll be an Elden Ring TV series
9. Xbox Cloud Gaming will come to Nintendo Switch
10. Atlus will announce Persona 6, and the mascot character will be a dog
11. BONUS: Disney will announce a video game console

MADDY

1. Princess Zelda will not be playable in Tears of the Kingdom
2. Nintendo will announce a Zelda TV show
3. Facebook and Meta will make a significant pivot due to the failure of Meta to take off with anyone ever (e.g., shutter VR entirely, acquire Twitter and lean hard into Twitter as the “new metaverse,” etc)
4. The Switch 2 will be announced and will be called the Super Nintendo Switch
5. The use of AI art will become normalized in game development to the extent that at least 3 major triple-A studios will use it in similar ways to High on Life
6. Three major games this year will be ones that we could reasonably call “mom games” (rather than “dad games”)
7. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will nod at the Spider-Verse and include Spider-Gwen as a playable character
8. Sony or NIntendo or Valve will create a new cloud gaming competitor to xCloud
9. Netfix will release an exclusive game for its mobile app that becomes extremely successful on the scale of Pokemon Go or Genshin Impact
10. There will be a video game announced or even released involving a household smart tech item, like the Samsung Smart Fridge, etc.
11. BONUS: Cloud and Sephiroth will kiss in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and/or Final Fantasy canon

JASON

1. At least three Final Fantasy games will come out, not counting ports
2. Someone will put out a video game created largely by AI
3. Civilization 7 will be announced and come out
4. Nintendo will announce and release a brand new 3D Mario game
5. EA will be acquired
6. Tony Soprano will come to Multiversus
7. One of the major sports games (Madden, EA soccer, NBA 2K etc) will switch to a two-year cycle
8. Jim Ryan will be fired/step down
9. The Legend of Zelda will finally get LEGO sets
10. Bungie will announce and release a new game
11. BONUS: Hogwarts Legacy will have a hidden message saying "f--- you JK Rowling"

Our 63rd Last Week in AI episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

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• Voice AI is scary good now. Video game actors hate it.

• Robot rock: can big tech pick pop’s next megastar?

• Study finds that few major AI research papers consider negative impacts

• Researchers turn to machine learning to predict when immunotherapy will be effective

• Amazon is using algorithms with little human intervention to fire Flex workers

• Israel used world's first AI-guided combat drone swarm in Gaza attacks

• Google's algorithm misidentified an engineer as a serial killer

Find this and more in our text version of this news roundup:  https://lastweekin.ai/p/123

Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Our 48th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

This week:

• This OpenAI GPT-3 Powered Demo Is A Glimpse of NPCs In The Future

• Band of AI startups launch ‘rebel alliance’ for interoperability

• An AI is training counselors to deal with teens in crisis

• This cute book explains AI to children, without scary Terminators

Find this and more in our text version of this news roundup:  https://lastweekin.ai/p/105

Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)