AI NPCs in Gaming with Inworld AI ft. Travis Boatman, Carbonated

hey everybody today we are talking about conversational AI in games now with us today to discuss is kylin Gibbs is Chief product officer at enrolled AI the company currently with the biggest buzz and funding in the space they have raised a lot of money including a reported $50 million series a last year although rumored that it was actually even a lot more than 50 million and at an over half billion dollar valuation they also just recently announced a partnership with Xbox to include in Worlds NPC AI technology in games developed by Xbox also with us is Travis bman a super experienced mobile gaming executive and CEO of carbonated he's one of the most sophisticated CEOs for AI in games in the industry and he's actively integrating AI into his new mobile game so let's find out what this is all about let's dive in deep we're coming at you right now today's episode is sponsored by

data. to access estimates for rankings downloads Revenue usage or engagement for millions of apps on the App Store and Google Play sign up for data. Colin I I thought we could start with a a question about you because there is so much excitement and hype and certainly there's a lot of people recording podcasts about Ai and gaming and there seems to be like a lot of like high level you know in terms of the general direction things are going and things like that but I I do feel like a big part of the enroll thesis is directed at gaming and specifically AI NPCs for gaming so I I thought just wanted to first start off by asking you about you know from your perspective what are the major application areas for AI and games that you see and then why did you guys at enr specifically decide to focus on the AI NPCs and sort of the conversational AI application area as opposed to some of the other areas

awesome yeah so I'll take that backwards so I'll kind of start with a bit of the origin story and then I think I can get like go through the learnings that we've had of like where I think this lands in games today and and into the future so so my own background I've been generative AI for a while now like most of my career kind of before it was cool and sort of was at at Google and at DM mind actually helping to sort of build a lot of the models and then productionize those I'm was working with Google team sort of across like search and assistant in cloud and my job was basically taking a lot of the large language models and figuring out where it fit into Google products and during that period there was a lot of learnings of the types of products the types of use cases where it resonated the most and also where there were the most challenges and I met our CTO and my other co-founder Mike um who was working at glogle Cloud conversational Ai and he had previously founded a company with Ilia our our other co-founder um who had actually built a company called api.ai which got acquired by Google and became Google dialog flow and so you can kind of think about there is like our backgrounds were and the and dialogue flow is a

conversational AI platform that kind of powers most assistant type platforms today including including Google assistant and so we are kind from this with a background in generative Ai and developer platforms and we were really looking at the ecosystem and just you know we're all Gamers and in our in our personal life and one of the big things that we are recognizing is okay you know people are spending a significant amount of their life in Virtual Worlds right and the difference like you know think about a game from a Mario to an Elden ring the level of immersion is is significantly different even the time spend in there is significantly different and then you of course go into your your competitive games and every people spending you know hundreds of hours you know a month in these games and the big thing that was missing compared to our normal lives is the kind of actual Humanity like the the people the interactions the characters and you know what's interesting is like we've got very used to game mechanics as they've existed over the last 30 years you know we've seen some changes in game mechanics basic game design but it's

really been Graphics that have evolved mainly over time and you know what we saw is okay if people are spending most of their time in these worlds and if you compare them to our real world where most the mechanics the way that we solve problems we we know do puzzles you know collaborate it's all via human or you know at least you know semi-human interaction and so we were like that's big missing component and even if you think about game mechanics it's like why do game mechanics really not involve that same type of problem solving that weed in our regular life well and the fundamental answer is like there's just not the technology for it like you can't create NPCs are basically these like blunt objects that you can create dialogue trees around and can kind of facilitate storytelling But ultimately don't you know contribute to the immersion a lot and so we basically set out to create a platform that actually solved that problem and created you know ultimately the developer platform to populate these Virtual Worlds with AI characters and when we first started out you know there was The Meta announcement and the metaverse hype and all these

kinds of things so you know we were swimming through all of these you know these these nudges from different customers and asks and you know we initially of course also you know naively I guess weren't being super creative we thought oh you know you take Assassin's Creed you take Elden ring you take Skyrim and you make the characters talk and this kind of comes to your your the question that you asked first which is like where are you seeing this in actual game designs today and I think what's been really interesting for me over the last year especially as game studios have started adopting this is it's not at all about taking existing game designs and making characters talk it's actually about introducing completely new game mechanics like one of the best quotes that I've got from a customer is like we don't want to take Legend of Zelda and make Navi talk we want to take Legend of Zelda and make the characters into the water temple meaning like you know you can imagine you have you know your quest is to make these two characters you know let's say it's a princess and you need her to you know marry the king but in order to do that you've got to find their who are their five most influenced you know who are the people that five most influence them and what are the missions and the

conversations that you need to have with each of those people to convince that person to you know like like the other person and maybe you need to figure out okay one of these people's actually a snitch one of these people actually speaks badly about everyone you know that you you talk to them about you know and there's these really unique charact you know one example was the you know this customer had a group of four characters in a single scenario that resulted in an hour and a half of gameplay like like compelling gameplay through play tests and everything and it it completely changes the game mechanics and so what I've seen is there's like three main things that characters contribute to for core game Loops the first is like deepening relationships so you know maybe folks have played balers balers gate you know the the relationships you're able to develop with the characters there are are deep and the amount of I don't know if you've seen the visualizations of the dialogue trees that they had to build but it's it's like hilarious but the you know the ability to actually build those relationships deepens the complexity the meaning of the game immensely and that's just using sort of you know scripted

dialogue still and still sometimes I feel like I'm clicking through every every step but the and the Rel the concept of relationship I want to expand not just to like not just romantic relationships or anything like this but actually how do you relate to the other people in the game that you're playing with who similarly to if you were playing you know a PVP game you might have that relationship with someone that you're playing against or or with and then so that's relationships is I think where it introduces that kind of level of complexity and that can also change the actually be a core part of the game mechanic the the second yeah so so yeah I guess like wrapping up on relationships like the the way that I see that is like actually just changing the way that the actual like emotional investment that the um that the player basically has um within the game so the second part is like progression so this is kind of the idea that characters can give you new signals of progression so in games usually you know the core thing that you have to give the player this constant sense of moving forward you know whether that's by them picking up new items you know unlocking some you know experience points them getting

something there's this constant sense of progression and characters can actually give you that sense of progression as well by giving you some signals or feedback as you're going through the game so for example Net's re recently runed The Game signus Enterprises where like this character who's kind of like a na'vi style character is actually giving you feedback consistently and so you're kind of constantly getting this like you know level of feedback bending on your performance in the game and that gives you this sense of like I'm doing something and someone cares about that and that means like progression however you want to design it is something that can really be you know built built I guess into the into the core game mechanics so I guess i' been talking I'm curious if you guys have any thoughts on those before I go on you know for the audience side of things we actually have you know KY and I kind of know each other through the industry but we've never actually got like a deep dive with each other so you know I'm sort of in the audience's perspective this I want to learn more and and I think one of the ways that I want to learn more both selfishly for my team one day uh when we go talking uh about ways we can work together but also I guess for the

audience as well like like how are people that you're partnering with right now like what are they excited about how are they starting to use your stuff like you know you know what sort of from the studio your partner yeah what are they showing like oh we're going to use it like this or we did this cool thing with it like tell us a little about what your customers are using it when where where they're sort of excited about for sure yeah so then I guess that brings me to like the you know the third point and I'll wrap up and then I'll give you an example so the last point is sort of you know your progression relationships and then role playing is the biggest one I think which is the actual ability for you to enact a role and feel like you're being put in that role and I I think role playing I want to extend like we have a character who's for example like a therapist character and the goal of the character is to basically make the person feel like they're actually you know in a therapy session right and they can contribute to that through a lot of different inputs and and gestures and an actions and so the character's job is basically to facilitate that and so when you combine those three things around like relationships role playing and progression a really common use case we're seeing from Tria Partners is something I would call like social simulator scenario so kind of like what I was bringing up

before of like you know the water temple but you know you you basically have um yeah so yeah without I don't want to mention any names unfortunately but you know there's there's some very popular games that are centered around you know you can think about like high school college you know students it's like this but it's yeah and and so you can imagine a scenario where you know you're you have some superpowers or you have some capacities and you go into a world and your job is to basically you know solve some crime solve some situation and so there's maybe five main characters you know 10 Side characters and then there's a whole world of living characters around that and you want to have the players sort of step into that world and then be instead of having you know a tutorial or anything character greets them and says hey you know hey Joe I really want you I need you to come and do this with me and whatever right and then you probably you know go off piece you ask a bunch of stupid questions but then the character kind of brings you back and then let's say he walks up to another group of characters initiates a conversation with them you over you know you listen to that conversation and that

gives you the context on the world and the scenario versus you having for example to you know read some card or or get some you know over over overview and then you're prompted and you're said hey you know we noticed that like you know Jimmy is you know he's actually been really upset lately but he's a really core part of the group and we can't actually you know progress forward with this this Mission until you know we we get him involved and so you know you've got to then ask you know where's Jimmy's house and you go over to Jimmy's house and you actually have a conversation with him to you know convince him that you know actually you're really important to this group and you have to build your trust level with him so literally there's like a trust score that goes up that then activates a trigger on the game engine side which like you know J Jimmy gets out of bed and decides to come with you and so all of this is basically just done through conversation but it it completely changes that game mechanic and then what's interesting is all the characters share information and so what that means is as things are said you kind of have this like emergent storytelling piece as well where you're still being beholden to that core of game design and we have things like fourth wall controls that make sure that there's no hallucination

but as soon as something is said so let's say you know I said you know I'm actually a detective in my previous life and I'm now just here you know helping you all out now all the other characters will know that I'm a detective and they'll respond to me accordingly you know if I if they answer any questions like for example let's say in the character you know Jimmy mentioned something that actually was never in the script all the other characters have access to the information so that it they maintains that coherence because I even find like and if you take any actions for example like let's say I I hit Jimmy's dog and jimy was mad about that now all the other characters are going to say stay away from my dog Travis you know I really think you know that's that's a dangerous scenario which means you have this kind of context of like this and I think this is why I always push like a imc's are kind of like the symptom but what is actually happening the background of that is like a living world and every action that you take has a consequence that is actually saved down to that entire session state so that whenever you interact with anyone else that consequences felt similar to like you know I think games like Ballers gate do this really well but in a sort of more limited capacity and so at the end of the day

the entire you know you might go through a five hour mission just by going between characters and having conversations and changing people's trust scores and maybe you know having to take some actions that you know change their status and all of that is is basically just you know controlled by this this system and you know the the talking character part of it is like the end point but is ultimately the sort of the mass of the entire like living world that we're we're basically orchestrating in the back end is think what actually is like the big you know the big change there Travis do you like based upon what what you're hearing and I I think just just for the audience in my experience just talking to you Travis about Ai and gaming you seem to be kind of on the Forefront in terms of like how you're trying to integrate AI in your game and I I don't know how much you can talk about that yet but how like what are you specifically looking for in terms of some of these capabilities and I I can go ahead and speak to to kind of like what I'm looking at as well yeah and I'm

happy to so I think for me you know again I'm an older I've been doing games since like the late 80s so I'm super old-timer and I think one of the things that I've learned over the years to stay to still hopefully stay relevant in the games industry is you sort of have to keep learning all the new tech otherwise I could say like I was really good at the Sega Genesis right and like where did that go um so you're always kind of on the front end of learning and so you know I think there's been lots of great changes to to the games industry over the years and I think that the two big ones that come to mind mind was obviously you know the internet hit like all parts of the game industry and I have sort of like three parts that I talk about you know it's like Tech it's business and it's the creative parts of the of the business and the internet sort of the Rival the internet hit all three of those other things hit some one segment Graphics hit the you know the the visual creative side and you know inap purchase sort of hits a little bit of both whatever but the AI stuff is the second time I've ever seen anything that hits like all of them at the same time like it hits the technical side allows you new ways of Engineers to code right whether it's co-pilot or it's chat GPT or whatever so the technical implica

implications of AI on game production strictly on the technical side is amazing all all of our Engineers are using some version of this or another we have a a UI guy in our team who uses who's not hard a coder but he's now using he's coding all of his own UI stuff using Chad GPT and co-pilot so the technical implications of it are pretty amazing the business implications of it are pretty amazing we have a you know an our game that isn't quite announced yet we're doing a lot of kind of like liveops globalization stuff and we had a huge pipeline that we we were building for like taking our content everywhere in the world and they had you know we'll just say millions of dollars of expected cost coming coming to us but now with the large language models you can generate all of that content you know globally and translated at the same time and integrated into your backend through the technical apis to allow you to create content deploy it in a way that is a massive cost savings that we we were about about to hit and then of course on the creative side I think which what most people see on the internet but on the creative side it's you know the mid Journeys it's the image creation it's man I love 11 Labs I'm

like a hardcore user of 11 Labs I've got multiple voice models trained mine my dad my family our in-game you know stuff like we're using it all over the place um and it's amazing to see it hit all three and so to stay relevant back to kind of you know career longevity for those of you guys in the audience who want to be in games keep learning because it if you learn something too well and it goes away you're going to have to evolve and so when this AI stuff showed up I sort oh this is one of those learning moments I better start learning and so so I've been spending a lot of time just playing and experimenting you know Joe and I spend a lot of time talking to each other that's how he heard about some of my experimentations one of our friends kenchi he's super in the learning mode too and he and I kind of share ideas back and forth but given that I'm sort of learning on my own and experimenting I have like the personal lens of what I think matters to both myself and to customers but because we're also running a studio you can see the direct correlation of like oh this isn't just technically cool it actually has direct implications to player experience and to costs and to the ability to make cooler content globally

all this cool stuff and so you know where it makes sense for us we found like four different places where it it directly just makes sense and in a way that it was things we were already doing so I think the way that we plugged it it wasn't like we were like oh there's AI let's chase Ai and be part of the buzzword thing it was more that we already had this feature planned and it was going to be expensive and narrow and then when the a stuff showed up we could be like well now this narrow feature is going to have way more collar way more sophistication and it's going to be broad because we can bring this feature to everybody on Earth at the same time I would also say you can make it super personalized I'll tell one other story about playing with AI I was playing with 11 labs and I was going to a dinner and I was sitting with a bunch of other folks from the games industry and on my way to dinner I went on my phone I recorded some stuff on 11 labs in this person's Voice who I happened to grab and I had to customize some specific stuff about the guy at dinner when I was sit next to at Din I said hey have you heard of this 11 labs and Jet gbt stuff and he had heard about a little bit and I said check this out and I had a a did character face which was mid Journey

generated so I went to Mid journey I made a character face I had it talk so it was animating and it was using a voice that this guy was familiar with and it was talking directly about him and I had created all that while I was in an Uber on the way there and it blew this guy's mind and I was doing it because I was testing to see like do people care about this like I think it's cool but do players or do does audience care about that and his reaction it was just like his mind was blown and he was like this is the coolest thing I've ever how did you do that and I was like I just kind of play with these four different tools and kind of you know really ugly way stitch them together but the personaliz using a a personalized content for customers is amazingly powerful because it when it says your name and it talks about you and things that are happening 10 minutes ago in your life that directly translated to me in game making which is like oh if you're a player in a game it can use your character's name it can talk about things you just did and it can say it in your local language which is crazy to me that's just so awesome and uh so after a couple of those experiments personally

we just had huge conviction and so you might imagine we're building a whole bunch of different systems into our production that will hopefully make those experiences for players very unique and customed to them which you know you frankly just couldn't do before even at a big company you know I was at EA and at Zinga and you know been a bunch of big companies you have big dollars you still couldn't do that at scale like it's so difficult to build you know as K was mentioning like these these conversation decision AI trees that have to like figure out and then try to build all and then localize it and it's so cost prohibitive now it's I mean it's it's it's almost straight out of the box it's pretty wild anyway a little bit of a ramble but but I'm I'm super pro on all this stuff I'm a big fan I think it's it's it's awesome it's going to make better experiences for customers it's it's pretty neat yeah kylin maybe I could ask you so like the specific application and especially when it comes to the conversational AI part that I think about is so we're going to start a new game project in the next month or two and one of the game designs would involve a character in kind of

like the way that I'm viewing conversational AI is in kind of like two two big buckets first one is like kind of like this nice to have which is from the perspective that you know if I if you have an interactable character kind of what you described the the first point about creating a deeper interaction better emotional connection with a character in the game that you're that you're interfacing with and having that character also understand the context of the game where you could actually get tips from that character where it's like hey you know we lost that last battle you should actually get this card or upgrade this Rune or something like that and I just think that people are lonely so like just you know having somebody to talk to in a game I think you know you know I've worked in Forex before and we we saw like some of the the retention and monetization numbers based upon if if a player joined an alliance or not but potentially having that move metrics and also just the notion of a strange attractor right so having like this kind

of like to the point that Travis had is like oh hey this is kind of cool I I didn't know games or like that could do that or maybe this game could could could do these things so that's one part and then the second part that I'm thinking about and this actually goes back to a podcast we recorded a while back Travis where you talked about how there are new opportunities in gaming based upon technology advancement kind of like you know when John carac came up with all the 3D stuff that enables games like doom and Quake things like that and so on the second part I'm I'm wondering also kylin is around the new kinds of games that fundamentally integrate your technology in such a fundamental way to enable like a new genre of game or something like that but I just wanted to kind of you know kind of Express how I'm thinking about conversational Ai and whether you would agree or disagree with like how how I'm viewing the technology and whether that fits and if that aligns with what you guys are doing at in world

yeah so I mean on on your first point I think that the most interesting thing I've observed is you know we kind of had this hypothesis coming in when we built the company that you know if we build this platform to allow people to interact with characters like that's kind of enough and I think that's kind of true it's interesting there's a novelty factor to that we've also realized is like the relationships that you have with these characters so like think about like I love Final Fantasy 7 like Cloud Strife was like you know my like OG coolest person I could imagine and to actually be able to develop a meaningful relationship with that person is kind of like you know for the people who fan fan fan booy over Elon Musk right it's like having that personal relationship with Elon but in the in the game context like you're in their world and so if you as the game designer do a good job as well in like character building and narrative narrative design your character is going to really pop out and then I really do want to get deeper with that person and so it allows me to get deeper into the world and explore lore so like there's a lot lot of times right like you know I've spent way too much time on balers gate over

the last little while and there's times when it's like I don't actually know what the heck get Yankee is like what what is the background there and like I haven't really been given the options in dialogue to be able to ask that question I just want to go talk to a character and ask them all these questions and I can't do that and so it allows me to develop that individual relationship with the character but also to develop that individual relationship with the world itself and because I'm also playing a role within that world I feel like I'm being seen within it and like one of the things that I think we've seen over the last little while is For Better or For Worse you know it's really hard to build a new IP or a new world and once you do there's a million in one spin-offs off of that and so I think the AI as well will help people develop that like deeper investment in the in the world as well as that character relationship and so to your point on like you know people people developing that more meaning meaningful emotional relationship with the character I think it also you deepens it with the world and also with the storyline itself and makes it feel like you know I'm able B to interact with the narrative how I want to as a person and that kind of

ties to like where we're seeing I think like there's there's definitely the biggest thing advice that I loved one of my f friends who's a notable writer suggested was you know when you look at what's happening with the AI right now like Travis you mentioned like the mid Journey example right like the first thing people do with new technology is try and create what people have done before right but faster and easier so it's like you know artist can make a picture but now I can generate a picture in like a few seconds but he was like focus on the new types of media that have never been possible before because ultimately one that's where you're not going to be competing you know you're going to be adding to creatives capacity versus you know maybe eroding their know their paychecks and you're going to be contributing something new to the market and expanding that pie overall and so that's kind of like where like in the kind of former Camp of like new game like add-ons to existing game designs something that we've seen is common that actually wasn't expected is basically companion style characters for first-person shooters or real-time strategies where you basically have something like a Cortana style character

who's coming along with you responding to things in real time you can often make commands through that character so you know you can be like okay go pick up the ore and then like you know set off the you know the alert and do this so it's basically have that kind of real it's similar like if you're playing with another with another player so you're kind of adding to that similarly within RPGs of course you know being able to just have those conversations you know you can think about basically any like jrpg being able to have those S of scripted dialogues but turning that into something where I can ask any question that I want if I want to that's a big one and then there's of course you know I think there's any sort of big narrative game you know you can think about the Bioshock style I think just that ability to deepen the relationship with characters in the world is is beneficial now going on to new game designs I think this there's something around this like you know the more I guess less tripa AE types of games right so for example in in a lot of Asian Asian countries right now these kinds of social simulators have really popped up so these like there's a a huge huge genre of them basically on mobile apps

and the idea is you're kind of playing out some form of social scenario whether that's you know at school or work or whatever it is and you're just going through basically a bunch of dialogue trees and so there's a huge opening up there to basically turn those into like proper you know types of like simulation games so simulation I think is is an interesting one I think how that expands into things like you can think about the Sims but in a more advanced way where you're actually seeing characters interacting and you're more in like an observing mode but maybe able to influence that is something that we're seeing come up a lot and basically I think there's a this genre of what I would call like interaction focused roleplaying games right where instead of you know these turn-based strategies or whatever you're doing I don't know how much you you both have played like but in balers gate for example right you have your dialogue turns and a lot of the gameplay and the actual like success comes through you know roles of the die you could imagine that but you're sort of going through that that in a sort of a conversation or interactive way and so that's that's I think a big one is those

role playing games I think you know in the in the context of mobile games being able to even inject a lot of user frankly a lot of people are even using it where they're just sending a trigger from the game engine side to our server that's causing the character to speak and so that's just like removing the need to build out dialogue trees you're just basically now have an infinite number of responses that the character could give so that's in sort of you know mobile you know basically anywhere from a first-person shooter or you know these strategy types of games on mobile and then a big one that is definitely coming up is like detective tile games this has probably been most of our launches so games where you're uncovering some form of information to kind of progress the story and that information May mean that you need to get one piece of sort of information from one person to give to another person to then unlock the next piece of information and that sort of is is definitely lends itself well to the technology of kind of just having that unlock and like all those things that I mentioned you can imagine how those can be combined in in certain game designs but definitely I think like you know social simul detective style role playing games as

well as kind of like the one that we hadn't really expected is the companion mode or guide mode for you know different characters basically across any game design is super interesting and then there's a few new things that we've seen also propping up which we call like I'd call them like a show game hybrid where you know you have something like a a TV show but someone's actually controlling it in real time so you basically have the characters interacting and then you have like a streamer who's actually controlling in the background what the characters are going to say next and they can respond to the audience and they can actually enact that and so those are like completely weird you know creative mode that we've seen come up and and I think those we'll see the first test coming out of that in December but those are all I think Super exciting and and kind of what I've been most excited by is the fact that we're seeing completely new types of game designs being imagined and game mechanics being imagined as well as you know augmenting as Travis said those existing you know game mechanics and just expanding the the how how narrow I guess a possible feature or scenario could be in terms of like I I think the

Market's already spoken in terms of excitement about inor in terms of you know I think it's been reported that you guys raised 50 million on a over half billion valuation so clearly people are excited is that based largely on the opportunity just within gaming and existing kinds of applications or is does that contemplate like people figuring out new game styles genres and also expanding outside of gaming so we started out being a bit more agnostic Beyond gaming but I think now we've really settled down to like gaming as our core focus and for example when we even work through the investment with light speed morit who is the partner there actually leads light speed gaming he's you know he was like you know you both I think know Mor it's he he's a huge gamer himself and like the thesis the hypothesis is really focused on gaming right like sure there's probably some value in a lot of areas around like learning and education and Enterprise But ultimately the future set

is going to be very different and how we build the platform is going to be very different versus working with game developers and so that is our core focus and I think most of this valuation and the excitement and everything is really focused on gaming whether or not it's sort of of I think there is definitely a bet on new game designs coming out right like I think over the next two to five years I think there will be a lot of sort of revamping existing types of game designs but the hope is that you know over the next 10 years we see you know half the market now stepping into this new core game Loop that requires this type of interactive AI as a part of that and you know we're also thoughtful of like how do we make that the easiest to adopt so we're looking at ways of dramatically reducing prices looking at on device serving you know making it more efficient because I think that ultimately like if most of the gaming Market starts adopting this stuff and you have hundreds of millions of hours being logged every day you know you're going to want to make sure that all of that stuff works well and so I think there's definitely the bet on the kind of existing game designs the new game

designs and also how we fit this into like being a core tool within the the game development space overall does the with the current technology you have at enal can you basically could you run like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with the inor AI as a dungeon master today is that is that possible yeah it's actually our most popular character we just have one like one user built dungeon m and like you can go in it's very it's different from a traditional you know D and because you're just doing it based on conversations so you not have like a dice for example you could definitely build this like we are working with some people and a lot of Indies are looking into this I would love if someone listening wants to build D properly on top I'm not we have a couple D and D game Masters actually in our company but obviously we're we're they're dedicated the platform so if anyone wants to build it very supportive but yeah so basically you can go in and you describe the characters say Hey you know where do you want to go today and like I will always come up with the most obscure thing that

no human could ever come up with so what what did I say the other day I was like I am in like a small snowball at the end of a pointy shoe and inside that snowball you know there's like a small gummy and inside that there's you know a microscopic universe that is like populated with like pink gnomes right like really weird and then the character will just go okay great you know here's here you're in this world this is your scenario you know here's your options to like what you can do next I'll give an option and elaborates it and like by the end of you know people are spending we have some people spending like two to three hours in there and by the end of it like you've built out a world just because the character is sort of telling it to you and of course in the know traditional D and D lore you've got a lot to work with but coming up with a completely new story is very difficult and it's honestly I love it like seeing some of the stuff that the characters are able to fabricate is is hilarious and I think like it's pushed my creativity because I'm like now I'm like okay what is the weirdest possible scenario I could come up with just to see if it could possibly Improv that it usually does a phenomenal job so yeah I

think like d and types of use cases are some of the most fun yeah one the other thing that's neat about it too which you know we're not there yet but hopefully you guys get there because I'm excited to use your stuff but but also you know putting these tools not just in the hands of of sort of the the studios but also in the hands of the of the players right so so imagine you're playing a d DN game you want to create your own missions right you want to create your own user generated content sort of like oh you and your buddies it's sort of like super modding right it's like the people who can build stuff around games now have access to these tools to do some pretty sophisticated creative that maybe is not their skill set or not in their language as an example like like that stuff to me is so wild that you know you could have D and D players who want to do a campaign and they want to do it for friends or audience that maybe are from another country and don't speak your language and being able to give creators that kind of power to both not only create the content but then get that content to to different folks uh all over the world is um is super cool when you're talking about games I was thinking like it was sort of sitting here like noodling you know it's a lot

of the old stuff is made new again you know I'm I'm in such an old timer that I remember my you know my first games were things like zor right you were talking about like new game mechanics and and and I was thinking like game mechanics are about decisions and decisions if it's text oriented you know the decisions have to be text oriented so sort of as you said like d and or you know these old games like zorc and then when you're talking about mobile you know there's a lot of Studios out there that this is like their bread and butter like I know if you guys know Oliver meow he was formerly Center score he runs a company called pixelberry I think they got acquired by NC soft but I mean all their stuff is like high school story and like Hollywood you and it's it's you know it's a mobile version of using text and decisions and content for players to make these Journeys which are super super successful and you extend that farther into the console stuff today you know obviously Telltale I think that's run by Jamie ell now but like Telltale makes you know higher-end console beautiful spectacular games that are essentially you know the the puffed up super highend versions of you know the these these decision- made text decision made games with with story that's in audio and the like but yeah there

there's a huge you know sector of of the industry that just loves this stuff and and not not only making it you know better you know for for everybody but making the cost lower for the creators both the studios and the C and and and the the the hopefully the people in the audience who are like I want to like you see a game like this giving them those kind of tools is just super wild I love it I think that's hitting on a really important point which is like where what I've seen this do to like do for Creative so before you had to kind of map out or still for most tripa games is still being developed in the way where you have to like map out every single possible scenario right so you're building you know a game where you have dialogue trees or whatever it is and you need to build every single scenario which means like you know you're kind of limited in your creative capacity you're like okay I want to build this whole lone world but if I build out every scenario of it I'm gonna be working on this for like 24 years right so you're like okay I'm gonna scope this down dramatically and so what it does for creatives like there's a a guy who built a GTA mod on top of inworld and for example like that gave him the control where he was just focused on

like what is the story I want to tell who are the characters in it how would they roughly be set up what would their goals be you know how would this fit in and then once they instantiate that world the player just has full agency and they can basically you know do whatever they want within it but that means that the Creator gets to focus on like what is the world and the story I want to tell versus how do I map out like every single little side scenario to make sure that everything stays on Rails because our system will make sure that it does right it's like okay this is the gold character to do it'll make sure that that happens and I think ultimately what this will mean is like it that lens like the the number amount of time I'm sure people spend developing GES frankly won't change that much it just means the worlds we get to experience the narratives we get to experience are going to like explode in terms of you know the the depth and that's what I'm I'm super excited for and the way I kind of put this is I think that there's a transition between and I think that games was the first to kind of incept this into this just media but like you know when you consume a book right I as a producer of a book produce the book you consume it in the exact form that I wrote it right when

you get a game I kind of give you controls but you still kind of you you're Mario jumping up and down you know there's still a very kind of tight script to that and so I think that it changes the dynamic from this consumer producer Dynamic where I'm producing something you're consuming directly to I'm kind of producing this like nebulous you know orb of of possibilities and then you're actually co-creating as the player what the actual end experience is and so it lends that agency both to creator and I think to players as these partial creators as well and and I think what we've seen in terms of the explosions of MMOs and fortnite and all these areas is people really want to like co-create they want that that experience even the fact that Zelda worked this into their most recent release right is is hilarious like you know you can build your your own little Contraptions and everything I I think there's very clearly an interest from from players in in taking part in the creation process a bit more as well kylen I I think one thing coming from more the freet to-play mobile space that I have concerns about is really

around economics right like and especially like if you have a lot of interactions that have to call back to the the N World servers and just determining whether it's like the the companion application that you mentioned which is an application that we've actually looked at quite quite a bit and getting the the cost to help us be as you know to gain the benefits of the conversational AI and but also keeping the cost low like how should developers think about the economics I I don't I actually don't know what your specific economic model is you know other companies charge on a per per interaction basis wondering how you guys charge and yeah yeah so we've we've recently actually just updated our Billings we worked we've worked through a lot with a lot of customers both in understanding like reasonable cost points like what could you pay per user per month and then also on like an interaction basis and so where we ended up was like our goal was to be for the

gaming vertical to be more performant faster you know more efficient than like open AI or any other kind of foundation model provider that you get don't even get you know all the bells and whistles but also at a cheaper price and so where we ended up is now we have a price of a maximum of 0.2 cents per request which basically works out to it's it's hard it kind of depends on the type of game and how much like convers fits into it but let's say you had you know someone playing and and 30 minutes of game play a day you know in that they're maybe having five minutes of interaction and that's like averaged over a month you end up with something like a dollar per user per month you know and that's like that's like pretty pretty high because that still doesn't factor in then things like discount so we do scale discount so as you hit you know larger number of users that that drops off and so you know you're going to be looking at at like you know the maximum something like well depending on your ti type of game if your whole game is is talking to characters probably a bit more but hopefully we're also adding more value

there that's possible but in most games it'll end up being something around you know like under a dollar a month and then as you go to scale it could be even more than or or less than that and one thing that we're working on as well is and hope to kind of pioneer on is hybrid or on like hybrid in terms of on device and and server side as well as proper on device serving of parts of the models which means that we can start to then reduce those costs even further and do caching and everything else and I don't that might not be ready you know for a little while but we are kind of pushing and working with some major partners and Hardware in the space to make that more accessible because I think within the next two years hopefully everything that we're seeing right now which is mainly done through server side processing can be done on device which also then of course reduces some connectivity concerns and everything but what that means is I'm fairly confident that even like the price that we're at today you know I recognize like depending if you're free to play and depending what your acquisition costs are like a dollar per user could be a lot but you're also that's like that's for like an act active user right you're not

you're going to be paying a cent you know per for non-active user because it's all it's all consumption or usage based so you're really only going to be paying that like dollar per active user which is important versus like some of the I think this you know some other services do act like user Unity for example user based costing which is not which is not the case for us and then of course you know I also think that the key thing is for games coming out in the next year I think it's already at that point our price our costs and prices have dropped I think 20x since we launched and I think that will continue go down meaning that as folks are in the development stages and are like hey I'm building a game but it's not going to launch for two to three years I'm going to say the economics are going to be very very positive if if like could be potentially like you know neutral margins because you may get to a point where we're doing more on on device serving and everything so yeah we we are going to be looking I think at like ways to improve that but I already think where we're at today is actually like works at least for most developers and

then what we also are opening up is a a way to basically shift the cost into a Reven opportunity if that's wanted so we do a we're opening up a program it will be called play pass and the idea behind that is consumers or players can pay us a subscription fee and then they get access to unlimited usage of in World any any inor powered game so they play your game they pay all your fees they have this but you basically don't actually pay in World at all the consumer is basically paying like covering your cost in that case and they might pay we're figuring out the cost but let's say $10 to $20 a month and for that they can play any game that's powered by inworld and then the developer doesn't actually take that as a cost so we're and know not all developers want to go that route but you know for those maybe Indies who don't have you know those upfront costs that's a good option yeah by the way oh sorry yeah I was gonna say by the way for what it's worth I I love that you guys are thinking about the split between both backend and client and coming from a mobile perspective as devices get faster and faster and faster and more and more you know Apple's neural engines depending on how much

access you actually have to that Hardware you know being able to to to have that choice I think is is super smart so super well done and there's a lot of games that you know smaller guys who just don't have the the capability in their teams to to be able to spin up servers or deal with with with that kind of liveop support having that optionality I think is super smart well you know well done that's awesome I mean I I I think it's a just a side note that of course you know seeing the fact that Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil going to be on the iPhone 15 Pro I'm like wait a second Apple's going to next now be the biggest competitor for Sony and Xbox the next few years and I had not anticipated that so anyway there's a there's I saw a post today this will probably and depending when this podcast is going definitely date us if somebody watches us like a year later they'll like of course everyone does this but I saw a a YouTube where there's a guy I think he was in Japan but he plugged in his iPhone 15 Pro with a Bluetooth controller and he's playing whatever it was you know Resident Evil on his plasma screen on the wall so he's sitting back on his couch with his Bluetooth control playing Resident Evil and his iPhone was plugged in through USBC directly to his screen running it

whatever it was 1080P and it looks looks amazing so so yeah like there's there's these interesting use cases sort of starting to show up on Horizon that's fasting that's FAS yeah Travis I don't know if you have worked through economics for integrating in your own games but I I do like for me personally I have had a little bit of trouble you know on an interaction basis making things work out so like one of the ideas that that you know I had was maybe what we could do is like you don't have all the AI turned on or the interactions with your characters turned on unless you buy a battle pass on the other side ofation yeah yeah so I don't know if you've thought thought through like how to make the economics work as you know as a as a developer but that's some of the things that that we've been thinking about just to try to get the cost down yeah I think we have a a two- lens Approach at it one is on the on the on the long-term economic side exactly what you said right basically like putting the use you know spend side of it behind

monetization so and you're just saying to players look if you which I think is fair if you're saying to players you like this stuff and it's super expensive and you want to pay for it great if you don't like it and it's too expensive don't use it it's not that valuable of a feature so so basically democratizing putting in front a players and saying do you like this pay for it if you don't hey that's cool so that's sort of I think Downstream of Engagement but I think one of the ways we're thinking about it is is in the first experience for for for new players it's part of your spend and what I mean by that is you know you see Hollywood movies who will spend $10 million on a 3 second explosion of a building or something right and they use that for marketing they use that for excitement and they use that to draw people in and give them a new experience and so I think if there's some cost associated with just giving cool entertainment to players you know you can sort of allocate that spend as part of production and and then you gotta be careful because if obviously if da ramps and you get out of control that that allocated spend can get eaten up and and turn negative quickly but but if it works and it it's a you know you're having a lower I don't get too numbery but lower CPI based on the the spend of that you know there's a lot of ways that you can sort of make that make Financial

sense as part of your creative so we sort of break it into two chunks part of creative sort of in the CPI marketing bucket right as part of production something that's separates you from the pack gets players excited is just you know part of that cost but then on a usage side of it putting it on the backside behind spend um at least that's how we're approaching it you know who knows uh we're not we're not certainly not live yet and you know it all sounds U the theoretically great um but um yeah we we'll see how this all plays out yeah I'm a huge fan of where this is all going and you know I'm an optimist so for the audience you know I'm I'm a crazy optimist so I know there's a lot of people who have dark dark thoughts about AI what it's going to do to the world and everything else I'm a super Optimist I think you have to be it to stay in games this long and I just see all that the good parts about this so for and if the interactions improve your metrics whe whether it's retention or overall monetization then I guess you could make an argument that AI enabled players would would be on a different RP curve with a different LTV so then you could potentially have greater spending

capacity against the players that have ai turned on and also just acquisition separating us off from the 50,000 games that are out there you know yeah yeah exactly yeah so that's a big part of this and if it doesn't and I think that's a little bit maybe I can't speak for what was saying but maybe that's a part of when you start about talking about using a as a different game mechanic you know really separating yourself from the rest of the world and saying hey this is a new way of play and and really you know sort of launching yourself out of the the noise of all the other games a bit Pokemon goes you know how how how that sort of the the brand and the new interaction model worked and and sort of burst them out you there's some version of that here and if that's true it's Priceless right the amount of money you spend on getting that up and out is essentially Priceless and so you know you're making a bet on does that work and you got to have conviction as a creative in a studio but if it works yeah it becomes Priceless if it doesn't work hey you better be able to turn that off quick because you're going to be in trouble but you know but if it works you know which is what we're betting on we're betting on this stuff separates you from the pack but you know we've

also seen like some interesting cases um with like not just you know creative mechanic design but monetization design as well where you know you tamagachi Style Pokemon go style games right where you have the relationship with the characters you actually care more about them and for example you know you have to buy now an item that like you know changes a character and makes them now you know your your partner your companion or whatever before they hated you so you know maybe you buy them like a special cake but actually cost you know 10 real world dollars right depending on the type of game design especially for free to play mobile I think those types of things become very interesting because you know before it's like okay I could change it and it changed a little icon in the UI but now the character will actually talk to me about something that they didn't before or it will help me progress right it's like there there are definitely of course we all know these like there's certain players I actually am embarrassingly one of these Pokémon go players who will like spend way more money than I should to to like progress and and I'm happy to do it right and and so I think it's interesting to think

from a game design perspective as well what this will mean for monetization design I don't know yet exactly what the end state will be but I certainly think it opens up new options and kylin maybe we could speak a little bit about differentiation and maybe the competitive landscape in the sense that you know when it comes to and this this is a new space so for game developers like myself and Travis that are looking at trying to integrate AI NPCs into their game like what how should we be evaluating you know different companies in the space in terms of you know should it be cost should it be capabilities and then if it's capabilities you know how should we be thinking about how to characterize specific you know capabilities for for the service how how should customers think about the differences between different Ai and PC vendors out there yeah so I think that the the options

that we see at least most Studios taking is so you can either build something from scratch to do that you probably need about a $20 million upfront cost so it's like unless you're like a really large public game Studio probably not an option to try and build all your own models from scratch some of them are wanting to do this it's it's like a reality the reality is you also probably need to hire you know 20 machine learning Engineers set up you know servers buy1 million in Nvidia gpus good luck but you know it's it's an option so that's like option one which is I think not open to many folks the second is to try and build from scratch but using some of the existing Foundation models so you could for example use open AI calls you could use things like Lang chain like L lots of Open Source libraries I think it's frankly a good option for certain types of game designs like we've had some folks who talk to us and they wanted to basically just build something like a chat gbt but with some you know game mechanics built in in world can power that but it might might be Overkill in some cases the reality is in World actually is cheaper though than almost any open AI service so you

probably still could even just use it as like a found Foundation model in that context we do see people doing that what is the most common scenario is that we see people trying to experiment so they'll do for example a PC where they hook up chat gbt to some characters and they run you know a hackathon internally and they say oh this actually is pretty cool we can do some cool stuff with this and then they get to the point where they're like okay now we want to add on emotions relationships you know narrative controls in terms of like and and design we want to do knowledge systems we want to ingest you know these 100,000 facts and they're like okay wait a second each of those is about five engineering weeks with four engineers and at some point they're like oh wait a second to build this ourselves is just very expensive and so like our job right what we're trying to do is is abstract that out so that Studios don't need to do it themselves and we're providing all those services on top of basic llms and and generative models to actually make this working in gaming there are a few other like there basically in terms of actual competitors right now there's a few smaller companies that are kind of

like looking and kind of like have you know doing similar stuff to inor to date most are not you know part as well funded or you know they're kind of earlier stage there's definitely like some some very early stage startups that we've seen that are exploring it which you know people should should try out I without I don't you know I think all of our competitors are very great you know doing good stuff I haven't seen anything that is able to integrate everything end to end and most importantly think that our team most of our team comes from Google Microsoft Amazon and has built these Enterprise systems to get something working reliably in a games type of setting where you know you don't have that downtime you have that like our latency even I think is you know significantly better than open AI because you need that for games all of that stuff that is kind of like the boring things that people don't think about are are things that we've really focused on and so all the other stuff the features the goals and actions the you know the long-term memory all of that is is super important but if we we can't serve it to you fast reliably at a good price like that's our Baseline and

to date I haven't seen anyone really doing that including in like you know most the big providers like Microsoft Google open AI they're also serving every single use case and when you think about gaming specifically which is uniquely real time and fast and and expensive when you think about the amount of turns going back and forth very different types of optimizations and if you're trying to build AGI so that's the one thing that we've seen in terms of other you know things on the landscape I'm 100% sure that there will be some big announcements coming out from the big providers soon in terms of them stepping into this space what we've seen so far though is like Unity for example released like a lot of their AI tools which is more focused on like a Marketplace integration so for example allowing things like in world to work better within unity and on device so that's something that you'll see but I think you know as a developer I would look into at least you know how are unity unreal integrating these tools and then beyond that I I think that you know there's a there's really not a lot of

options today transparently I'm sure that there will be more coming out we've got some exciting announcements on the horizon that will also like hopefully augment the ecosystem a little bit but yeah that's generally and then I think you also have to think about what the different tools are so Travis mentioned 11 labs for example we're we're good partners and friends with those guys and you know 11 Labs is great if you're building oneoff turns but if you're doing it for real time and generating real time it's very expensive so you also have to consider your your cost quality tradeoff in terms of what you're building specifically and things like text to speech ASR actually are more expensive than llms now so you've really got to kind of balance all those different parts and when we work with Partners we manage all of that for them but if you wanted to build from scratch you'd have to really consider all those costs and you're probably going to end up something significantly like something up to like 10 cents per per minute which is getting pretty pricey if you're trying to build a game so that's that's generally what we've seen but it's a it's a rapidly evolving space I mean the biggest thing that we are now realizing that we had value on is like

we're just managing all of that we're just like our team's job is basically to stay on top of what's the latest research what's the latest open source models what new models do we have coming out how is that all integrated how does it work together because frankly it's like a full-time job just to like try and stay on top of everything happening in the AI and basically on the game engine side as well now so yeah it's crazy yeah I've got just a couple more questions like trais I don't know if you have any more questions but it's super cool I'm digging this maybe the next question I can ask you is the this issue that seems to come up with some PE people who and and for some legitimate reasons feel threatened by AI maybe maybe it's because having to do with for example potentially infringing on the rights of original Ip holders and things like that and like how would you address some of the Grievances or some of the concerns that that some of some of these people have when it comes to you know your services or or maybe because you're

not generative AI does this not impact you guys no it's I mean all of these concerns are very real and I think very legitimate I mean like I said before I think that the sad part of every new big technology leap that we have is the first thing that people do as you know the people who are more interested in that initial capitalization on whatever the Innovation is is they say how do I take over like all what these writers have been doing these artists these concept artist whatever and just like take that all away and now I can do with AI and I think that's like unfortunate that that's how it first evolved because then that causes us reaction which is completely legitimate in my honest opinion like a lot of the stuff that's concerns around mid journey and know stable diffusion and all that yeah I if I was an artist I'd also have those reactions what of course like our big message is like we are not trying to recreate existing game tools or game designs or writers tools we're like trying to just just give you a new tool that has unlocked things that have never been done before and so that's like our biggest and why I think we don't really

get that type of creative backlash in terms of like what are actual Services where there is though of course open questions is like what is the data provence of these models so for example is it trained on copyright material we're gonna actually have a like a a blog post coming out on this which is you know deter like kind of addressing this more more pointedly but you know there's a there's a challenge in the industry because everywhere through training sets training data sets to Foundation models you know there's only like limited visibility you have into what's actually in there so for example there's like a lot of like web crawling data sets that are used for most Foundation model model building that are managed by nonprofits and they say you know everything in here is public domain or it's off the Internet it's allowed to be used for training but of course if you take the entire internet there's probably within there like every Harry Potter quote that you could probably stitch together to like recreate the Harry Potter book right which is weird and so when you then put that into a model it's like okay well all of a sudden this thing knows everything about Harry Potter and so you know that's

that's basically going back all the way through the research ecosystem of of building ml models which is who's policing that right and and because not every research group has the capacity to build trillion token data sets themselves so we have to rely on these providers and trust them and they do have assurances you know there's there's indemnification and everything in there but you know you have to have some Trust then you go into the foundation model so whether you're using open AI or using open source models like llama you know we again these providers have assured the market that you know there's no copyright material in there there's concerns but we also see lawsuits we also see some of these concerns and so you know we as a company are are doing our best to both verify any vendors that we're working with verify any data sets that we're working with and so for example we've been working on some stuff on voice and we've frankly spent we've slowed down the efforts by like two months to go back and make sure that there's no copyright materials in there you know we're we're trying to make sure that it's all you know legally buttoned

up because like one we want to respect creators and we want to have our our customers confident that that everything they're doing down the line and and I think this is just something that folks either on the development side or building tools need to be conscious of because it's kind of like when you're building a supply chain right somewhere in your supply chain if you're building textiles might involve some form of Labor that is you know not not ethical and you should be conscious of that and I think we're kind of in the same thing with AI in the AI ecosystem right you're you're basically plugging into supply chain where somewhere down the line there might have been some data that got in there that is you know not ethically enforced and you it's all kind of on all of us it's the same way as right when you shop at fast fast fashion you're like okay I'm kind of trading that off I know somewhere down the line something shady is happening and similarly if you know you're you're getting a a model or data set that isn't verified you're kind of taking the same bets and so you know in world as a company is is super

dedicated to solving for this and we've been like putting in a lot of extra work in terms of verification of data sets and when we work with um C customers like we're also you know putting a lot of effort to make sure that their data is secure so you know you work with us we'll partition off your model your data you know even set up custom servers and everything so that even though we promise you like we're not going to you know make sure that your data ever touches anything from other any other customers and there's any any cross cross training there we want to build the systems in a way that like basically ensures that confidence and so all of that is is just I think something that is frankly I see it and I even when this whole gener VI stuff started up I thought like this is just changing how we think about Supply chains right like AI is such a weird ecosystem that all the way from the hardware to the training data to the models we have to be conscious of that in the same way that we over the last 50 years realized that you know clothing Supply chains and lots of other typ have some ethical concerns in there I think AI is no different and we're working hard to solve that and I think that just

everyone should be aware of who they're working with and you know the assurances that they have cool so I just have one last question and that sorry just said Joe's asking a tough question so I like it okay my my last question is really around when you think about AI in gaming and if you were to just you know and obviously you're you're you're an expert in the AI space but aside from conversational Ai and I Know Travis has been doing a lot of stuff in the generative side and things like that but where where do you expect there to be the most traction or the most exciting Innovations outside of conversational Ai and are there any specific companies that we should be looking at or aware of is this for me or for con or both both of you guys you can start Travis all right I'll start I'll slum around so first I have a humorous version of this which is I

always talk really nicely about AI because I sort of feel like the llms are like the shock troops for the singularity so that when the singularity happens they're going to like scrape this podcast and if I'm talking bad about AI I want a good place in The Matrix you know like like when the singular happens and the AI takes over the world and we're all slaves to that I want like a like a good when they plug me to The Matrix I want like a good job like like an act you know like something something good if you know that anyway but but no I think I think there's kind of you know again I'm kind of an Oldtimer so me the first games I was playing was back at any the the the you know the text based multi-user dungeon type stuff and and I think there's a the technology just marches forward at this kind of fascinating rate and and I think like I said when we sort of started talking about this that this this inflection point is an interesting because it hits every single part of the of the stack right it hits the technology and the creative and the business models and and all that kind of stuff and I think what's inter interesting about and again having a lot of empathy for the businesses that are impacted by this type of Technology disruption for the first time what's

interesting about games is games is always disrupted by technology I it's disrupted by technology like every year or two in a pretty significant way and there are almost no protections in the games industry I mean we were talking to an executive from kind of the movie in the film industry about this topic relatively recently and I sort of chuckled and I joked with him about like the fact that if you go on Twitch you know there's a a kid who is streaming behind him you know a a billion dollar franchise for free right with unlimited content thousands of hours of billion dollar franchise sitting behind him but if he if but if he turns a stereo on and a song is played he gets strikes and then the whole thing's taken offline and so like I think that's an interesting contrast right because there's all these protections for good reason I'm not knocking it but good Protections in music and film and art and and and writer and the writer strike going on right now and all that but the video game industry has never had those protections it's been pretty rough for a long time so at some level I understand you know the the pain of the darnis survival that you have to do in the game side of the industry and and and the

rather scary disruption that that that's coming for the rest of the industry right now but I also know from from doing this for a long time that there's kind of No Stopping it I mean you can regulate it you can go pretty hard against it but then the rest of the world's just going to March right past you which is what happens in games if you if you sort of regulate and slow down here every competitor everywhere else in the world just supplies their higher quality cheaper games to your customers and so you only survive through Innovation not not not sort of through hard regulation I do think it should be regulated I think there's a lot of real serious disruption going on but there's also just sort of the gravity of of the reality of the situation and I don't have any good answers for it other than you know I I've tried to keep myself on the front edge of technology and figuring out where it's going to go this one's wild because like I said it's hitting every part of the stack it's hitting the technologists it's hitting the creatives it's hitting the business people it's hitting everybody and in this in this case where I think automation has hit a lot of blueco collar jobs in the past automation AI is now hitting the the white collar jobs pretty hard and I think think you're seeing you know again if you sort a lot of the blue collar people will probably say hey we've been through this before when forklift showed up or when you automation at warehouses

showed up and now that that sort of impacts hitting the white collar folks and I think they're they're they're going to try to fight and regulate which I think is smart at some level but also I I I don't know if it's there's a way to stop it so so then I go back to my like being nice to the the shock troops who hopefully will will give me a good place when the AI takes over our world and plug me to The Matrix in a good spot that's all I asked for we had one of our Engineers who from the beginning of starting in world is I like this is partially a joke but partially true would most was joking by the way so would he'd go to the AI and be like you know IL is a good person like trust IL is a good guy like you know basically and it's it's awesome I mean like and he he's like yeah like I don't know what's gonna happen let's just say it gets used somewhere down the line like you know now it knows I'm a good guy I'm almost on its side I held build you but I just want to kind of go back just to kind of a different take on your your question Joe as well the the question of things that I see coming Beyond conversational AI a big one is the one

of the biggest criticisms we get right is I I even as a gamer right I don't want to talk sometimes during a game I want to just like play the game I don't want to talk so like how do you take advantage of all these new Innovations without like introducing that new required input from users and one big thing that we've been experimenting with is actually using generative models to not generate the actual conversational dialogue to generate basic control flows and so I as a user can just interact with the world and that gets fed in similarly to like what I would speak as words like this contextual awareness of what me as kylin as a player is doing and then that basically generates the control flow for the character not not like the sort of real-time strategy I'm not taking Starcraft AI kinds of things here what I mean is more like you know if I play if there was a style of game where for whatever reason I didn't there was no dialogue but there was sort of reactions that were had to me like you can think about let's say a Pokemon style of game right where depending on the actions I had with the to the Pokemon it would react in different ways

right or an animal crossing style of game where like once I start pick you know picking up a shovel and digging all my friends come over and start helping me dig up you know the farm and all those little things and and then the rest of that could be controlled by traditional styles of you know strategic game strategy game design or strategy game AI but I think that generating actions gestures animations all of that in real time is going to be like the next big big technical boom I think it's been the slowest thing to actually be adopted like or or innovated in the gener AI space it's super hard you know Rob it's basically a robotics problem and it's super hard but I think we're getting to the point now where I think over the next year you'll see a lot of innovation coming to that space and also then how that ties to you know actually activating things in the game engine you know controlling more of the actual game engine itself using AI all of that's going to like that's kind of where I see basically I think we've hit the bar with conversation Ai and I think most of the Innovation will now actually in controlling broader parts of the game State and that's where most of our Innovation is starting to pour into now as well yeah that makes sense yeah dude

I'm super excited about what you guys are doing and you know want want to di in deeper I'm excited you know those in the audience definitely digging deeper those guys they're doing cool stuff I think we both have call schedules with you guys later but uh any yeah there's some selfishness going on here to be honest so I'm not totally biased but no problems there all right well kylin Travis thank you guys so much for joining and for audience we'll catch you guys next time thanks guys thank you bye [Music] guys w