The new Simpsons episode Sunday night highlighted the NFT bubble in all its absurdity, fun, and FOMO. Though we believe the word “NFT” has lost all credibility, we also believe that digital collectibles using the same technology are destined for more than speculation and trading. In short, we admire The Simpsons quick-witted storytelling on the 2021’s non-fungible bubble!
The plot: Homer and Bart turn Bart’s butt into an NFT, accidentally trapping him in the blockchain as the first tokenized and thus highly valuable human being. To save him, Marge has to tokenize herself and make her way through a train of rejected NFTs to enter the grail citadel. Inside, Bart is being massaged by a Jaded Ape while surrounded by homages to XCOPY, Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers, and Beeple’s $66M 5000 Days and $28.9M physical piece, HUMAN_ONE.
In Other News Yesterday - OpenAI’s *First* DevDay!
Sam Altman announced “GPTs” yesterday in a session that was reminiscent of Epic Games’ launch of UEFN at GDC in April, except that creators will come to OpenAI as a general software development platform. The presentation included demonstrations of GPT customization on actions like managing one’s calendar and travel. In short, GPTs will be customized versions of ChatGPT that can retain instructions. Sam’s call to developers was - come build on our platform and make money with us.
It will be important to understand how OpenAI will be able to adapt to vertical specific workflows, tools and processes. In game development as an example, while one may be in awe of their ability to create a beautiful asset from a text prompt (aka “zero shot”), these assets will not likely be usable in AAA gaming environments.
We believe that Sortium AI is on the right path on this point. As game developers and creators themselves, they take everything that is available, including OpenAI, and then add their own proprietary technology and package it in a way that the game developer community will understand. They integrate tools like Blender and work flows that game developers have already been using to create AAA games. As mentioned in the past, Sortium AI’s approach reminds us of the early days in blockchain gaming. Then, as now, the crypto community underestimated the value of experience in creating video games. We would love to hear your takeaways from the first OpenAI DevDay?
Inworld x XBOX
Inworld, an AI Character Engine that enlivens NPCs with personalities, goals, and in-game “memories” (very Westworld), is collaborating with console producer / game platform XBOX to develop AI game dialogue & narrative tools at scale. The partnership will work on the following tools:
1. An AI design copilot that assists game designers to generate more ideas, turn prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more.
2. An AI character runtime engine that can be integrated into the game client, enabling entirely new narratives with dynamically-generated stories, quests, and dialogue for players to experience.
Inworld is part of Microsoft’s M12 fund and has most recently been valued at $500M. We are all for storylines and the NPCs that live within them to feel more authentic than ever, but we are also wary of an overreliance on these scripting tools. Characters and stories are the heart of games - it's what keeps people coming back to an adventure, making their own fan-fiction and cosplays. Great characters can transform a game into a multi-media franchise. With its rapid advancement, will an AI tool be seen as the cheaper, yet less rich, alternative to human writers?
Disclaimer: An affiliate of Signum Growth is an investor in Epic Games, Discord, Mythical, Build A Rocket Boy, and Sortium AI.