I literally spoke with Nvidia's AI-powered video game NPCs
theverge.com
theverge.com
More like a few orders of magnitude faster and less resource intensive, the elephant in the room with this technology is that it's currently being offloaded to an expensive cloud instance where it can have an entire high-end GPU devoted to it. For it to be the kind of thing that games can adopt as a matter of course, without having to factor in a significant ongoing cost and point of failure when the servers go down or the money to pay the bills runs out, it needs to be fast enough to run locally on the players machine while the machine is also busy handling everything else in the game. Realistically you can afford to use maybe 5-10% of their GPUs time and memory, and you can't expect everyone to have an RTX 4090 so it needs to scale down gracefully.
There's a few great games writers out there (IMO Chris Avellone) but most of the time it's just filler. Fiction is arguably one of GPTs' strong suits, especially if the game engine can actually turn accidental hallucinations into in-game realities (like if a NPC mentions something not already in game, generate a proxy and turn it into a quest?)
Really excited about the possibilities for emergent creativity here :)
This does not sound trivial
The need is then to have a database of everything (done!), build a generator for quest steps, and then place the quest requirements back in the game. This sorry of thing has been possible since, oh, I dunno, 1997: Daggerfall.
The whole trick is keeping it from getting too same-y/boring. Current games handle that by leaning on human writing and character modeling for even the minor quests, though the quality standards on the side quests tend to be low, and they get boring anyway. (Which is why I've still never finished Witcher 3...) Adding AI writing in the mix for side quests is a no brainer.
Do you believe an AI trained on human writing can accomplish this key task better than human writers, who themselves _at best_ have a pretty low success rate?
Does it get more involved and customizable later on?
Non-technical people are reading the “stochastic parrot” articles, then trying a few superficial chat conversations and drawing their conclusions from that.
They've both been marketed as such. Like it or not these are the best that big tech could provide before the LLM era. I would include Bixby in there as an also-ran as well. They would be the only interaction that anyone would have with anything resembling AI outside of the tech world.
If loras could be easily trained in Vulkan/DirectX, if vram pools were big enough for the smart models, basically if stuff just worked, you'd already see much more widespread local llm use in apps.
The constraint technology is largely there, take a look at Outlines. So is the ability to efficiently "switch" personalities with Lorax. So are long context base models (Yi/InternLM/Mixtral). Even the super-fast Vulkan inference runtime is there (MLC-LLM). And yes, these are all early, finicky unintegrated implementations which is part of the problem.
“ah this is flawed! I’m assuming fundamentally! I’m going to ignore it for that reason and keep the same opinion for the next 10 years!”
another group says “ah this is flawed! I’m going to help improve it incrementally!”
This idea is the same. It reeks of the same senselessness as is present in other discussions of "realism" in games, eg Star Citizen, where it sounds cool and futuristic at first, but doesn't actually do much for the core gameplay besides taking resources away from it. As an example we have Elite Dangerous, which committed suicide by listening to "realism" arguments and poured years of development into adding a bland first person shooter mode instead of improving the core gameplay of flying spaceships (where, in terms of flight model, they are still unmatched).
Ideas like being able to naturally talk to NPCs sound neat and revolutionary at first, but are just a gimmick, since outside of streamers fooling around for the sake of entertaining viewers, who actually cares about holding proper conversations with NPCs instead of just moving on to the next bit of actual gameplay sprinkled throughout the bland "AAA open world shooter with parkour mechanics" of the month?
I think there's a lot of potential with LLMs that have two-way interaction with the game world. For example if it can generate `ATTACK <character-name>` API calls, the player can incite a feud and convince it to betray some other character, to the player's advantage. For immersive sims and RPGs, unscripted manipulation of NPCs could be a big part of the "actual gameplay".
Social deduction games where you lie and manipulate real players are already fairly popular. I don't think manipulating an NPC guard will be worse.
> this isn't like shooting or driving in games where it has basically zero correspondence to how those things work irl
Gun or steering wheel + pedal controllers aren't that uncommon.
>Gun or steering wheel + pedal controllers aren't that uncommon
Neither gun shaped controllers nor typical wheel+pedal setups really mimic the real world equivalents sufficiently to transfer over. Else they would obviously be the much cheaper approach to learning/testing either of those skills than spending tons of real ammo or driving a real car.
I don't think the scenario has to be any less fanciful with LLM NPCs than with social deduction or tabletop role-playing games. It's realistic in that you have to fool the (LLM/human playing the) character, but it's still within a fictional setting.
> Else they would obviously be the much cheaper approach to learning/testing either of those skills than spending tons of real ammo or driving a real car.
Training simulators are absolutely used. Less so for cars, because real cars are accessible enough that it's not worth sacrificing 100% realism, but definitely by the military.
Or, consider games like paintball/airsoft.
One word: poker
Given the silly cartoony nature of the game, the current implementation is working fine for now. We are of course always looking at options when they present themselves, and as costs go down with the advancement of tech, it's more possible we'll see our characters speaking as well someday in the near future.
That's our answer from a design and product standpoint at least. Hope it's helpful!
Voice actors? gone
Writers? Severely cut down, maybe two main writers.
Designers? Eventually gone
This is the end. Eventually programmers will get replaced too. We just won’t need any employees. This is the end of civilization. We have to stop before it’s too late
What -- exactly -- would this mean? Legislation to prevent AI? Prevent commercialized AI? Believe it or not, that actually sounds dystopian to me. A society that's so afraid of the technology it's created that it would hide from it? What do we think of human societies that acknowledge modern technology but decide to only rely on technology from ~100-200 years ago? Why was that technology acceptable? Should we halt the ongoing AI research? Destroy computation devices used to execute AI algorithms?
If the US decided to ban AI, could they expect a cooperative ban from other countries? If any one country decided not to cooperate, they would likely get a huge financial benefit.
Of course: AI will come with downsides -- significant ones. But I think it'll be a net improvement. Like most of human history, big technological advances were disruptive and some have caused significant harms.
> Writers? Severely cut down, maybe two main writers.
This also means that the existing talented writers can produce more entertainment than they would on their own. What if this means that the most talented writers can succeed more than they would have without new technology? Is that a benefit or a drawback? What if this means that mediocre writers can succeed more than they would have without new technology? Is that a benefit or a drawback?
> We just won’t need any employees.
"Employees" seems like a relatively recent concept in human history. Maybe we don't want to be or have employees anyways?
These realignments are generally not pretty, but hardly civilization ending.
At worst, this realignment will see humans go the way of horses after the automobile instead of farmers after the industrial revolution. That is to say, at some point, there may be not be new jobs for humans to pivot into. However even that is not an existential threat to civilization. It is a threat to democratic capitalism; but civilization existed before democratic capitalism, and will continue to exist after it.
Having said that, the claim that this latest technological innovation will finally push humans out of the labor force has been made before; and I don't see any reason yet to think that this time will be different.
Probably before directors.