“It will go along with what you say, but if you go too crazy or don’t go along with anything, it doesn’t work as well.” “It’s almost like a really good improv partner,” Walton said. Sometimes it doesn’t quite understand what you want to do or gets confused if you intentionally do something that doesn’t make sense in a scenario. “It’s just so cool that every time I start a new game the story will be completely different from anything I’ve had before.” I’ve never heard of anyone having that adventure and I’ve played hundreds, if not thousands of games, and see thousands that people post. “And I’m like, ‘No, literally no one else has ever done that. “I have people who come to me and tell me ‘Oh, I have this cool adventure where I rode the dragon to this oracle and did X, Y, and Z, but I’m sure everyone does that,’” Walton said.

You literally can say or do anything, and the system will try to understand what you said and react to it – meaning every playthrough is completely unique. The result is a text-based game that asks you to choose a genre (fantasy, mystery, zombies, etc), a character (noble, princess, knight, etc), a name, and then… well, anything can happen. AI Dungeon is the first version that we can kind of build off of.” A limited game with a cool concept

“So I jumped on the chance to continue making awesome AI-powered games. “But I had this kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Walton said. So Walton refined it, feeding the system a bunch of text adventures to fine-tune it.Īfter finishing his degree in Computer Science, he had an offer to return to the automotive ‘unicorn’ Aurora Innovation to continue his work on autonomous systems. It began as a small, buggy experiment that was hard to play, and still proved relatively popular. Walton, who worked for a number of self-driving car companies, began to wonder whether this could be used to make a game. For some, it was a research benchmark.įor others, a warning of a future where fake news and Twitter bots could become significantly harder to spot. The reality wasn’t so extreme, but the system certainly impressed with its ability to generate almost-meaningful text on virtually any subject. The group, launched by Elon Musk and some of the Valley’s biggest tech luminaries, hyped up the unsupervised transformer language model as ‘too dangerous’ to be released. Let the games beginīack in 2019, OpenAI – a Silicon Valley research institute focused on creating general artificial intelligence – released Generative Pretrained Transformer 2, or GPT-2. What if it didn’t have to be this way? One startup is experimenting with what happens if you take one the most advanced artificial intelligence models in the world and use it to build a game. Some games force a completely linear narrative, others give the appearance of choice – but, at the end of the day, the number of options is always limited. I’ve never played a game where I could do or say anything. What happens when you combine cutting edge AI with a text based adventure formula?

The ultimate game master