Hacker News Reader

> For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost.

Hah, I'm actually working on just this problem.

Cost isn't the issue. There are only so many coherent (in context) responses and scenarios, that you don't need an LLM to generate text in the game, in real time. Instead, you can have LLMs build a vast corpus of "atoms" (dialog messages, fragments, cues, etc.) that can be stringed together in a deterministic way in response to player input. These can also be pre-screened and subjected to various tests prior to implementation.

To a player interacting in the game, a system like this would seem functionally indistinguishable from generated text within the game's designed interaction envelope. And it has huge advantages: Although it can expose seams if the player breaks character and decides to probe it, it won't be exploitable the way an LLM would be.

> LLMs to drive NPC dialog

Far more interested in dialog and characters developed by a writer - simulation is boring

>Far more interested in dialog and characters developed by a writer - simulation is boring

It entirely depends on the situation. Background NPCs that just have conversations among themselves would be a great use of LLMs to make the world feel more immersive. Obviously you never want to directly engage the player with LLM generated writing.

> For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost.

I have deployed LLM-based NPCs in production for a reasonably popular game (100k DAU), so this is news to me.

I count the start of this AI era as when ChatGPT was released, so we’re actually only 3.5 years in.

And we’re only about a year into the agentic coding era portion of that era.

> The way I see it, AI is going to change the world radically. It could be for the worse, the better, or a mix of both, but in my mind there's no doubt.

Worthless statement. Wow, you suspect something can make things better, worse, or both? That's a keen insight there.

> For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wireless technologies started picking up.

We are still so early.

I mean, we have advertised them in multiple super bowls, have companies that basically own tech news (incredulous journalists will repeat any stupid insane shit a CEO wants to say), that say they're valued at over a trillion dollars and nobody with the power to argue those finances seems willing to do anything but agree. We have built hundreds and hundreds of acres of data centers (and made deals for data centers that are never going to happen) that demand *billions* per month. They are devouring all the silicon to where people are visibly seeing the price of hardware double, triple, more in price. Work places insist on employees using AI (then pulled back because it turns out this stuff costs money and it's not fun anymore when it's not subsidized).

But we just need more time, more eyes, more people looking at it.

Where in the radio wave timeline did this happen?