← Mobile Dev Memo Podcast
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- [00:03]
Sponsor/Advertiser
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- [00:29]
Julian Togelius
The problem is that the distinction needs to be Dr. On between the confidence of the economists and the correctness of their analysis.
- [00:41]
Eric Sufert
Hello and welcome to the Mobile Dev Memo podcast. I'm your host, Eric Sufert and I'm joined today by Julian Togelius. Julian, welcome to the podcast.
- [00:48]
Julian Togelius
Hey, thank you, Eric. Good to be here.
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Eric Sufert
It's great to have you. So I know you through having the great pleasure of working alongside you at Unity, where we are both on the AI Council, but you also do a number of other things, very sort of prestigious cdc. So I'll let you kind of introduce yourself to the audience before we dive into the conversation.
- [01:08]
Julian Togelius
Awesome. Yeah, I'm a professor at MOU and I also have a habit of coming up with startups. So basically my main research is artificial intelligence for games and games for artificial intelligence. So how do you make games better with AI? And how do you use games to test AI, develop better AI? And when I say games, I mean anything that people play. Not so much like traditional board games, but more like, you know, Starcraft, Minecraft, Anycraft, Super Mario Bros. Doom, etc. And poker and so on. And then I founded a game testing company called Model AI, MODL AI and recently joined as head of AI another startup called N1, where we build AI for finance. And do I know anything about finance? No, but, you know, it's just another game, isn't it? And by way of background, I'm from Sweden originally, but I have been living in a bunch of places, Switzerland, England and so on. An academic career tends to take you to places, some more interesting than others.
- [02:15]
Eric Sufert
Yeah, so I actually had Christopher Holmgaard on the podcast in October 2024. So he's the CEO of Modal. So it's great to have you. It was tough to kind of come up with the questions because I think there's just so many interesting directions that we could take this conversation. I think just given our sort of, you know, mutual interest in games, that's probably the most logical place to start. So maybe just as a. As a big picture kind of question to set the tone for the conversation. What. What makes games a particularly rich area of Research for AI. Why? Why start there? Why? Why focus there?
- [02:49]
Julian Togelius
Games are fun. And that seems like a sort of inane thing to say. Ah, you just working with games because it's fun, not because it's fun stuff. But I think it's kind of something very deep about games being fun. What does fun mean? I mean fun is a very underdefined concept. We all can use it from time to time. And basically it means that something is interesting. It means that something engages our minds in a very particular thing. There is a famous theory which comes in different guises in game design. It's popularized by Ralph Koster who is a designer of a bunch of different well known games. Star Wars Online is maybe the most famous and it comes from developmental psychology like Piaget and Vygoski and so on, where you look at like the zones of proximal development. But then it comes to machine learning. So my former postdoc adviser Jurgen Schwittuber and it basically converges on that things are fun. Games and other things are fun because we learn as we go about them. They push our limits, they put us in a zone of proximal development. They force us to learn what's coming next. And a well designed game is an extremely well designed machine for pedagogics essentially for teaching it itself. It's not all there is to game. There are many other things to game. There's other games. There's also this thing that most games, almost all of them are an abstraction of some interesting real life activity. So you know, chess is about battles and Tetris is about, well, stacking things. You know, SimCity is about building cities. Super Mario Bros. Is about playing on a playground essentially. I was thinking about this the other day when my son was, who is a big Super Mario Bros. Fan, was like jumping into like a covered sheet on a playground. And it's just like, oh, I'm going into the pipe, let's see where I come out. He's like, oh yeah, right. This really is a playground. This platform gates or this playground is a platform game. So there are many good reasons why games are so interesting to study and to study AI with. And this has been recognized for a very long time. But for a very long time the only games that were like kind of kosher to work with AI were like boring stuff like chess and checkers and go. I mean, I'm sorry, apologies if you love chess and go and so on. You know, that's great but not my interest. And basically there's so much More to games. So you saw after AlphaGo, which is now 10 years ago, there are people saying that, okay, now we're done with games, we beat the games, now we can go on to more interesting stuff. And I'm like, wait, wait, we're just getting started. And we're still just getting started because there's so many different games and there's so many different challenges and so many different things like basically chess and checkers and go and stuff. They're all like, you know, zero sum, discrete, perfect information games with relatively few terms, relatively low branching factor, etc. And really not very indicative at all about all these fascinating video games that are out there. Or the other thing is, like, it's not just about playing games and it's not just about playing games well, to win them. It's also about playing games in the style of a particular player, generating game content, generating complete games, understanding players and so on.
- [06:10]
Eric Sufert
So Rap Koster is someone that I look up to a lot. So I actually saw him speak once at an event in Helsinki. But his book, A Theory of Fun is I think, kind of a must read for anybody that works in gaming. And it's interesting, I mean. Oh yeah. So you said that you think Star wars is the most famous of his games. I think it's Ultima Online.
- [06:30]
Julian Togelius
Oh, yeah.
- [06:31]
Eric Sufert
But what's interesting about those, you know, these MMORPGs is that concept is a fundamental deviation from a platform game like Mario, right? So you think about computer interactive video games, there are maybe sets of paths that you could take, but there was an endpoint, right? And you would beat it, right? You'd beat a game, right? And when you got to MMORPGs, there's no beating it, right? I mean, there's like this living society that persists. And you know, the incentive structure was different. A lot of it was like social, right? There, you know, different ways of, like, there's no, essentially like no score, right? There's maybe different ways you could consider like a score in terms of like the stats of your character, right? Or the number, the amount of money you had or the size. Like in Ultima Online, you could have a house, right? And like, you could have a castle. And the thing is, like, maybe that's a way of keeping score in some sense, or comparing yourself against other people. But there was no sort of singular, you know, kind of quantitative benchmark.
- [07:35]
Julian Togelius
But isn't this the case, Isn't this the case for like, many other games as well? Like, you know, so my son, who Turns four, you know, two weeks. So my son and I play Super Mario Wonder and we beat and it's great, it's great Nintendo design. We played this together and it's like they're so good at designing for like, you know, asymmetric co op basically. And we beat the game. You know, we kicked Bowser out of the castle. But that's just really the beginning of it. Like, even though it is in a sense as traditional as it gets, there's so many things you can set yourself. There's so many goals to set. Like, you know, and sometimes my son wants to replay various levels with no particular reason. Just like, you know, we're inventing new things of like, you know, carrying each other around and so on. There's so many kind of like there's so much game invention that goes on inside gameplay, right?
- [08:26]
Eric Sufert
No, yeah, yes, that's my point. That's kind of where I was getting at. Sorry, I was, I ended up getting caught in a whirlpool there. But like, so you know, Raph Costner, I mean with, with MMORPGs and that's part of what he talks about in the theory of Fun. It's like a game is not some one defined thing. So it's like interactive video games, right? Like they're not. There's not one template for it. Like and, and really what you're trying to do is you're trying to materialize that, that the primitive is fun. That's the whole theory of fun. Like how can we define that some way where we could apply it in all these different settings that may or may not look like what you would consider to be a game. And certainly like in many MMORPGs I spent a lot of times like being mad, right? Like it just gets frustrated and irritated and so like how does that factor? It's just like now you think about like okay, well now this is a much more abstract idea, right? You could teach an AI. Like there's probably like an AI agent that could like beat the original Super Mario Brothers. And like you speedrun it and beat it very quickly. Right? Like that's not really a great use case of AI, right. I think like the more sort of applicable and like helpful and valuable use case is probably summoning that that primitive of fun and allowing it to sort of explore that. Is that, is that maybe like a topic of research or how do you think about that?
- [09:37]
Julian Togelius
Oh yeah, oh yeah, definitely. So Super Mario Bros. Is kind of funny because it's like it's a ubiquitous kind of model organism in game AI research Partly because of like Notch, the original creator of Minecraft. Markus before Minecraft he did this little Java based version of Isuk Moybros colleague Moybros and one of my students, this back in my postdoc days turned this into an AI competition and that's basically been proliferating all over like basically it was back in 2009. And it's also funny like you know, could you make an agent that just wins and plays perfectly at Super Mario Bros. Well it depends. Turn on academic mode? Well, it depends on what kind of inputs you give the agent. Do you give it a simulator? If you have a simulator, yeah. Obviously an eight star agent can do extremely well and so on. And if you don't have that, it depends on is it like levels you've seen before, levels you've not seen before and so on unseen levels. Perfect play on unseen levels is perhaps surprisingly we're not there at all. We're not even not there. We don't even have an agent that can reliably win unseen levels in the absence of a simulator. Perhaps surprising. And this is a game that's been studied to death. This is like insane amounts of it, but a lot of work. That is the model organism I'm using model organism in the same way as you talk about fruit flies and genetics or like this little snail with 608 neurons or whatever in neuroscience. And it's basically people study Super Mario Bros. Because it's easy to work with and very understandable. And there's a lot of work in level generation and generating levels that bring out various types of challenge that would incentivize various kinds of fun, that would allow for as many different playstyles as possible and so on. A lot of the research is not really about playing the game. It's about measuring interesting aspects of a player's play at generating new content, generating new variations and using AI for that.
- [11:35]
Eric Sufert
And you said something really interesting about. So it's on your website too about what is the connection that you have to finance. Well, the stock market is a game, right? Essentially. There's obviously real life consequences there. But talk to me about that because do you think that is a motivate, Is that a fundamental motivation for you know, people that just do like think about like high frequency trading, right? Like Jane street or jump trading or hrt. I'd have to imagine that a lot of people go to those firms because it's just an easy way to say you're the best, right? Like a lot of these people did Math IO. They're probably a lot of the people at the competitive firms. The competing firms are people they know that competed against in math IO. And you know, if you implement an algorithm or you just have a better year than somebody else, you beat them. Like I have to imagine that's part of the motivation for some people to do it, other than just the money.
- [12:27]
Julian Togelius
Yeah, definitely. Lots of people go into quantitative finance and other types of finance because they just like the competition, they treat it as a game. But then again, on another level, the agents that you use for trading, because there's a lot of agentic trading going on. Even before LMMs, of course there were lot of agentic trading. It's not little snippets of code that execute, buy and sell and hold actions all the time. I mean, that's how the kind of like cyberspace, Wall street kind of thing works. Right? And they are gameplaying agents. They are basically little agents acting in reinforcement learning environments and learning to get better. The issue here, the problem here is that the game has changed over time. So basically you have the non stationarity of the markets. The market conditions are different today than they were yesterday. And the policy you had yesterday, maybe money may actually be counterproductive today. And how are you going to adapt to that? You can do this in many different ways. And one way you can look at it is that like it's not the local thing, it's like the whole kind of thing. Everything you can observe in the world and all the actions you could take. You could short bitcoin, buy Volvo and keep your something else options on something weird, South African gold or whatever. But the action space and the observation space for this problem is humongous. It's enormous. You cannot play that game. You don't have anything near the amount of data you need to learn a policy for that game. Where do you go from there? What everybody does is they go the other way. Basically they try to find very limited sub games and they try to find the sub games of like, you know, this kind of option today based on these kind of inputs, we can learn this and then we keep retraining it. And that's why the financial industry tends to work with very small models. So people who come from machine learning and go into finance, especially people who come from deep learning and go into finance, they tend to be a little bit shocked, like what are you doing? Why are you still having linear models and logistical question and decision trees and stuff like this? And like the Finance people will look at you like it works, and we can retrain it extremely fast. So what's the connection to games here? The connection to games is in generality. I said before that, you know, there's actually not an agent that can play on Super Mario Bros. Levels, you know, proficiently in the absence of a good simulator. And this is surprising. And if you take it one step further and you wanted to have an agent that can play any 2D platformer game in the style of Super Mario Bros. We definitely don't have that. Not even close. I mean, the problem of general gameplay is not like it's not only not sold, it's like we barely have any progress on it. Some people will take issue with a statement, and I will say that I actually know better, but it is surprisingly hard. And general gameplay is like general finance. And that's why people focus on playing one game like Go or Super Mario Bros. Or like, you know, trading one type of option and one type of rice or something like this. Yeah, because they can learn something.
- [15:36]
Eric Sufert
Let's get real.
- [15:38]
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- [16:05]
Eric Sufert
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- [16:08]
Sponsor/Advertiser
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- [16:12]
Eric Sufert
I want to talk about, like, generative tools for game production. Right. So you've done a lot of research there. And is the gaming industry fighting an uphill battle in terms of consumer sentiment around the use of AI in development? So I have the Crimson Desert experience in my mind. Right there is this. And I mean, this is. I think this is kind of like a Redditor, you know, backlash. I don't know if this is like a general public backlash, but, you know, these. On Reddit, people are upset. These obvious, like, placeholder graphics were made by AI, were shipped in the game. And how does the gaming industry position the use of AI as a benefit for consumers? How do they make the case that, look, you're better off if it costs us less, we can create more with the same budget. You're going to get more content, you're going to get more games as a Result of these tools. How do they make that case? Or is it just too late? I mean, we've just missed the boat on that.
- [17:03]
Julian Togelius
No, I find it super fascinating. Most game developers, or just staying away from it, we run this game AI Summer School every year since 2018. This year is going to be June 15 to 19 enlightenment. And we're always, we think it's a lot of fun doing this. It's me and a colleague of mine, Jorgos, and we invite people doing AI from within the games industry in a bunch of different roles and a bunch of different companies. And weirdly enough, it's actually become harder to get the speakers we really want. I mean, we have a great lineup this year because we work a lot on it, but a lot of people said no because they don't want to be associated with AI. Like maybe not them personally, but their companies. They're basically, nope, we cannot go out. We, this game studio cannot go out and do anything on the conference. What if our players find out, which I think is super fascinating. I don't know where this is going, if this is, if we're going to get into an even more polarized environment. Everything is polarized these days, right? And the AI debate is like in the polarized in a very, very unproductive way. There's a certain kind of boosters that are like, you know, agentic. Everything is the future of everything. And you know, please outsource your brain to Claude as soon as you can. And then there's like, you know, this kind of like, no dykes that are like, you know, I won't touch generative AI with a phone. And these are very unproductive positions possibly. Right. It's like there are real issues and I think the games industry as a whole is just staying away from it. They're just trying not to mention it. I don't know, do you see, do you see it differently or.
- [18:43]
Eric Sufert
No, I do see it that way, which I think is unfortunate.
- [18:47]
Julian Togelius
Sad. Yeah. I'd like to think about like, you know, there is AI in game dev and there are things that are like, yeah, I mean, no one wanted GTA 6 to take how many years to develop, like, you know, kind of crazy stuff.
- [19:01]
Eric Sufert
Clearly.
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Julian Togelius
A little bit of clearly there are like, you know, things that could be made more efficient. Right. But then there's also all the things that AI can make possible in terms of new game experiences, new things that we could build otherwise, like AI of various kinds inside the game, from non player characters to environment generation to like player adaptation and A lot of fascinating stuff. And I fear. Because that's one of my main interests really, and I fear that that is going to. That's going to get caught up basically. People are going to sort of not want to experiment with this because it looks bad or.
- [19:37]
Eric Sufert
Yeah. Or just that it gets leaked that they used it and there's some kind of moral panic about it, which is so bizarre to me because look, if you want indies to make commercially successful games that reach your phone or reach your PlayStation or whatever, I mean, what better pathway to that than these AI tools? I mean, it's such a net good. I don't even really understand what the perceived downside is from the gamer's perspective, other than they think that they're just getting a kind of algorithmically generated experience versus something that was handcrafted and artisanal. But I don't think anybody is intending to use AI for that purpose. Right. And that was the weird thing to me about the Crimson Desert episode. It was like textures, right? Is that an issue that the textures were made by AI? Does that really matter?
- [20:32]
Julian Togelius
No, that's. It's kind of silly. I don't know. I tend to think of it as like what people feel. There's a lot of people's reactions to AI in society. That's kind of proxies people are. People dislike generative AI in general and they fear that it's like taking over things that they were good at doing things they enjoy doing. And I. I mean, I can relate. I think I'm a good writer. I like writing. I do not like that the models are so good at writing. I mean, this is my personal opinion, but people see this and they kind of perceive that, okay, this is nothing I can do anything about. And then they get angry at like data center build outs that take the like basically that soak up the electric power. Or they get angry at textures generated in some game. You know, it's like he's a proxy hanger, I think.
- [21:25]
Eric Sufert
Right.
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Julian Togelius
It's also true that I don't like reading something. If someone sends me some AI generated piece of text, I get slightly angry at them. Like, why do I have to read this if you didn't write it? And it's a bit like I'm playing this level in this game I paid money for. And I expect the kind of intentionality where if I run into this kind of dead end and there is not something for me there. There was no one who thought about this. Part of playing a game is that you are interacting with a system that someone built for people like you, right?
- [21:58]
Eric Sufert
So I, I get offended if someone sends me obvious AI out like ChatGPT output. I get offended. That's offensive. But at the same time I also get offended if someone sends me sloppy grammatically incorrect text that is riddled with spelling errors or punctuation mistakes. I expect, now I expect perfection. You've got all the tools at your disposal to send something that's unclear, it's difficult to parse out any meaning from. You could have sent this to ChatGPT and had it criti seek this for clarity, for readability like you should have. I expect that. Now I expect perfection. So I don't, don't give me something that it just output, but give me something that it checked.
- [22:40]
Julian Togelius
As we say in gamerski, get good, right?
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Eric Sufert
Get good. And like you have, you have no excuse, right? You have no excuse for that. And so like I take a point, it's like, hey Look, I paid 70 bucks for this game and you're sending me. There's AI slop visible in the textures. But in that case it was like someone found it. And the thing is going back to this idea of the theory of fun and MMORPGs, like, well, at some point you've got to expect that that's the only way that some truly open world game is going to be possible. Because otherwise you're going to 20 year dev cycle and it's still going to be a constrained thing. Right? And actually that was the other thread I wanted to pull on here, which was GTA 6. Right. I read an interesting thought on Twitter the other day and someone said like, GTA 6 is the last pre AI open world game and from now on these games will have much shorter dev cycles, much lower costs. I mean it's a billion dollar game. GTA 6 is a billion dollar game. That's how much it costs to make. They recovered that in pre sales. They recovered that in pre sales, right. So, but nonetheless, I mean like it's, it's like it's. I think that's probably true. And my kind of reaction was great. That means I don't have to wait more than a decade, right, for the next GTA 6. That's fantastic. That's fantastic news.
- [23:55]
Julian Togelius
I think that's true as well. You know, it's like, you know, I games sooner. I mean, sure, there are like too many games already and there will always be too many games, but you know, yeah, can we get better games? That's great. You know, I like that as a game consumer but what I'm really interested in is like as a game researcher and AI researchers, can we put runtime AI in here to sort of. Because I've had this like Getty for a long time about like imagine some GTA X, you know, and you are basically, you're in some place and you basically decided you want to go four hours in like that direction, you know, just like randomly choose it and then it would basically create a new world or like new regions. There's a city there that no one has ever been to before. And it's created and it's basically has new architecture, new quest lines, new people, new sort of scenery, whatever, a little bit no man's sky, like, but it's kind of. It fits together. It fits together with storylines from the rest of the world and maybe some of these challenges in there are what the game thinks that you may enjoy doing next elaborations on the kind of quests you like and so on. Will people like it or will people hate it? Because on the one hand it's like generative AI and game design on steroids. There's literally no human has been involved in creating this new city because it was created right now for you. You know, on the other hand, there's this long tradition of pcg, so roguelikes and so on. I love roguelikes. And a significant stream of my research has been like, how can we make this better? How can we make, you know, more personalized or more controllable or more kind of like better in some version, some variant content generation for like online creation, co creation in games? I think that's going to be a big thing and I don't know what people think about it. I mean, I look forward to it.
- [25:48]
Eric Sufert
Well, I think that's actually that sets up my next question really well. What do you think the optimal AI enabled content generation pipeline looks like? Is there a human in the loop for that reason that you can't just let this procedural train completely run away because that might, I don't know, maybe that induces some kind of psychosis or something. But then people aren't feeling like they're. They're because. But also it's like the loss of connectivity with the other experience that. The experience that other people are having, right? Like, okay, if I had this totally unique experience, like who do I commiserate with about it, right? Is it. So is there. Is. Is that the optimal pipeline does include a human in loop in some way and these are just kind of like, these are productivity tools. It's not generous. It's not pure play. Totally expansive infinite generation tools. They're productivity tools that make us faster. They make one person can do the work of 10 people. Or is it really. No, we're going to have these experiences at some point that actually is the optimal outcome, I think.
- [26:42]
Julian Togelius
Optimal outcome. I mean we all know that games started off. I mean there's like, you know, for people who are not gamers, which is not us, you know, we're gamers. People who are not gamers tend to look at games and like oh, it's this thing, you know, this is what games look like. But you know, games has always been like this super multifaceted and diverse thing. And it's getting even more like, more like this. You know, you look at like what kind of games were released last year and you find like everything. I mean even if you look only look at games that actually got attention, like what's this game where you're like basically unpacking someone's life? Is it called unpacking or something? And then you find walking Simulators and RPGs and Grand Strategy 4X Games and I don't know how many bizarre kind of mobile game sort of genres come up there. So I think the future will hold all of this and much more. There will definitely be games that are more or less like they are made like they are done today mostly with a little bit of like you probably use cloud or cursor or something like this to write your code and probably some kind of generative AI tool set. But it's mostly like pattern on game development as today. And then there will be other games where like the design work of the game design, the game designers who, because most game designers are perfectionists, right? They want you to have the illusion of your own agency while they actually have designed all of this ahead of time for you. But there will also be a room for another type of game designer that designs the experience machine more like that and basically sets up like tools, chains and so on for things to change as you are playing the game. That of course the other question you had, I mean for me like personally I think there's so much interesting to do research wise in like this kind of more generative tool chain. And what does design look like when you sort of jump up an abstraction layer and you kind of never as a designer you never touch the actual level or the actual rooms for driving or something. You design the rooms for how this is going to be automatically designed, some of it during design time. But much of it at runtime. Because that's another thing about like truly open ended games. I mean memory is expensive and the world is enormous and that's always been the case and there's always going to be the case. There's always going to be more world to model than we can fit into memory in some way. That was true for Elite, that was true for no Man's sky, it's true for gta, whatever. This type of game will have to have some kind of runtime generation going on. The other question we had about what about the social aspects of this? Oh, it's interesting because it's going to be really different, right? I used to be the kind of person who like, it's funny, when I was working at IIT University, Copenhagen, I was sitting right next to TL Taylor who's like a world famous online so MMO anthropologist. He basically started that whole kind of line of research and she was going on about how games were always social. And I was like, no, I basically I pull the curtains and then I sort of disconnect my Xbox from wi fi and I sit there and play all of my. The outside world. I don't communicate with anyone. I'm an asocial gamer. But then she was like, oh, do you never read strategy guides? Well then I was just like shut up. So basically I think that in that case it might be about inviting other people into the world that the game has created for you or that you have co created with the game.
- [30:20]
Eric Sufert
To your point, it's just up to the designer to make that happen, to figure out what that framework is. Maybe it's sharing, you know, generated worlds or maybe there's just some sort of new framework for making it social. In that same way it's like, well, I'm playing it and I'm in my own generated environment. No one is ever going to see this the exact same way I saw it. But there's still some other touch point that I have with other people to discuss or to experience, to share the experience. Maybe it's just like some kind of system of trade or something. I don't know, it could be anything but, but that's, that's the job now. That's the job is figuring out the theory of fun, right? How do you connect that to this theory of fun? That's the true primitive and like the actual format that it takes or the just the visual output is almost like secondary to that and that just is what the job becomes. But I think I was talking about this the other Day I gave a talk at this event and I was having lunch with the CEO and the chief product officer of this company. And one of the guys, his son is like 17, right. So he's thinking about colleges. And I was saying, I don't envy you. You know, my. My kids are very young. Right. So don't think about this for a while. But I don't know what I would tell my son to study now. And probably it would be just humanities. Like, I. I genuinely don't think I could recommend going to study computer science, which is unfortunate because I love co. I love coding. I used to love. I found it really relaxing. Like, I felt like it was for. So one thing that I've always just found really interesting, and maybe this is just. It's peculiar to me, but I can't listen to music that has lyrics if I'm writing. It's distracting.
- [31:50]
Julian Togelius
Same the lyrics in languages I know, Sure. I love finding like really aggressive hip hop in languages I don't understand.
- [31:57]
Eric Sufert
Yeah, I like. You emphasize the aggressive hip hop.
- [32:02]
Julian Togelius
Yeah, yeah. It should be like. It should sound like, like, like they threaten you and you're like, I don't understand a word of yours, but this is awesome. But.
- [32:09]
Eric Sufert
But when I'm coding, I can. And it's because, like, coding is just rules based, right? It's rules based and things work or they don't, but what isn't is our architecture design. And now coding is essentially just architecture design, system design. And that I feel the same way about. I can't have lyrics in the music if I'm actually thinking through the prompt that I'm going to send to Codex or whatever have you call it code, whatever. Because it's distracting and there's got to be just something less than there in like cognitive load and. Whereas I could just sit and churn out code all day because it's like kind of procedural and I understand the rules. So if the computer scientist of the future or the systems architect or the game designer of the future really is just mediating systems design only, then what should they be educated in? And I think you're just talking about critical thinking, and I think you're probably just talking about the humanities, like philosophy, literature. Like, how do you. How can you read something and truly parse meaning from it like that? That to me feels like the skill set that you need even if you are working at a tech company building products.
- [33:22]
Julian Togelius
Yeah. My first degree is in. My bachelor's is technically major in philosophy. I did end up taking a ton of other Things but you know, I wrote my bachelor's thesis in philosophy and minus one and yeah, this is like still the core of what I am and this is like has shaped my thinking so much. So if my son or daughter when a time comes, say they want to go study philosophy, I'm like, yeah, great Eddie. I mean do take some other classes. You know, philosophy needs like side dishes to work but it's like that's definitely a good idea. The thing about coding, I mean a cognitive node, I think cognitive node is not the one one dimensional thing. It's like I think there's so many different ways you can do. I mean when you draw, I mean drawing or painting is like to some extent, right. And I, I come from a family of like mission artists. So both my parents and a bunch of other people in, in my, in my family are painters or something. Something around that and it's so fascinating to see that, you know, this is like you kind of, they often need music to do this. It's like, you know, gets you in that, right? Kind of. You kind of need to occupy some part of your brain while you're doing the rest of the other brain. And I think the same for coding. I also think coding is like the reason why LLMs are so good at coding and reinforcement learning with Liverival rewards have worked so well for that is that coding is a game. And that's also why coding is so fun. I mean you are playing the game as you are writing this code and it's like a game that kind of like classic single player games with clear rewards like you're playing. It's like games with minerals or playing Minesweeper or something like this. And the corollary of this, one corollary of this is that it's not clear how well coding skill really transfers to other things that are not like coding in the same way as like, you know, there's no observable transfer basically between Super Mario Bros. And chess or Starcraft or something like that, which I think is a perspective on what foundation models know and don't know.
- [35:33]
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- [36:09]
Eric Sufert
Talk to me about the promise of world models. So fundamentally, what do people hope world models accomplish that language models can't? Like when Yann Lecun says, look, we're going to hit a wall with LLMs, world models are like the next big leg of progress. What is he talking about? And then relate this to gaming. And why is gaming important in that discussion?
- [36:27]
Julian Togelius
World models is a very broad term. It's basically in a very technical sense, in reinforcement learning. It's a transition model. Basically, if you are in this state of the world and this action is taken, and then what's the next state of the world going to be? But then what exactly that means and how you represent that, it varies a lot. What people tend to think of is something like genie. So Google's Project genie, essentially a steerable video model. You can code up something, you can prompt up like, hey, I want to play a racing game set in Greenwich Village, New York. And you get something that looks, it looks nice and it plays a little bit like a racing game. It kind of sucks, but. And it stops to decohere after a bit. And you know, even within the one minute you're allowed to play, like, you know, you see that the, the physics starts behaving and like the sort of, the other car starts looking wonkier and wonkier and stuff like this. But anyway, what's fascinating is that it works at all. It's really interesting. And I mean, I know both you and I and many others have racked our brains, like, what does this mean? And it's not really clear because like, when Google sort of went on the big sort of publicity about progeny, stocks and game companies hacked, and this was kind of weird and it's just like some kind of strange overreaction because that's not what it is. It's not the replacement for game creation. It's not a replacement for game engines. It's like, it has lots of disadvantages and a few of the advantages of game engines. It's like really hard to edit things. You had to edit it with a prompt, which is really inexact. You don't have the exact editing you have in a game engine. It's slow, it's hard to predict. You know, it's like, it's not deterministic fundamentally and so on. So basically it has almost none, nothing of what game designers value about game engines. But clearly it is very good at something. You know, what is the something? But how can we fit this into the sort of content workflows we can think of or how can we think of new content workflows and new types of experiences? It may be that this is, I mean, OpenAI had this Sora video creator for a bit that tried to make a social network. It was fun for a bit and then it was too limited. You could very well imagine that something like Sora about interactive experiences, game creation, social networks where you basically create different games for each other. It's unclear if we have enough and many people have tried that sort of thing with kind of not word models, but more like, you know, some kind of more traditional kind of game engine thing. I think it's fundamentally a good idea someone is going to succeed with us, maybe based on a neural game engine. Maybe I was based on something else, but it's going to be someone is going to make something big for this. The other thing is that it's a cool prototyping thing. Like, you know, you can just prompt your way into a weird world you can interact with, it's broken as hell, but then you can basically get ideas that you can remodel in a game engine or basically have a model look at like play through what you created and create a game engine version of it that you can then actually build the game out of. There are probably other things. On a very technical level, you could imagine using this as forward models. If you train, if you tune a neural game engine on a particular game and then create a very low dimensional version of it, it runs really fast. Because an issue with current game engines is that they don't simulate fast enough so you can't really run planning in them. Maybe you can use neural game engines for that. It's one possibility, but I don't know. It's very fascinating. I don't know where it's going.
- [40:11]
Eric Sufert
Yeah, I think my sense is like the prototyping piece is probably like. And look, I mean like with a lot of this stuff you don't want to get anchored to the current capabilities either of the model or just the carrying capacity of the hardware because I mean the stuff changes too rapidly. But my sense is like the prototyping piece makes a lot of sense, right? Like, I mean if I want to just render a full environment and even if it's a minute of gameplay, but just have a like. And then, okay, well does this work? And then if I want to like scrap all that and then try something that's like fundamentally different, like you imagine this, like I always kind of return to this idea of like in mobile, you know, you want to test theme, tone and like environment. Right. And setting. Right. And so like, well, all three of those things in combination is a pretty heavy lift if I needed it to like radically alter all three of those things. Like imagine like photorealistic noir crime game or cartoony viking battle game. All three of those. If it's a totally new game, all those assets changing everything. I mean that's. If I need to do all that now if I could just render those prompts and see, okay, which of these do I feel like best captures what I'm trying to do, then. Okay, at least then I have some in a day. I could test 50 variations of those and just see which one of these best fits my vision and maybe even test them as ads. Right. And then see who clicks on what. That feels like a use case.
- [41:38]
Julian Togelius
Ads, by the way, is the kind of content that is time limited enough that the kind of limited coherence and limited kind of like interactivity of your game engines would actually be really good for ads if you just manage to. Basically the problem here is the size of the train network.
- [41:54]
Eric Sufert
Right.
- [41:54]
Julian Togelius
But that's going to be. Someone will figure that one out. So it could be cool. You could get a lot of really personalized, hyper personalized ads that are generated game world for you that you interact with and that tries to sell you something.
- [42:12]
Eric Sufert
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm sure we're not too far away from that. Julian, this was fantastic. How can people consume more of your wisdom? How can they stay in touch with you?
- [42:22]
Julian Togelius
They just type my last name, D O G E L I U S into their favorite social network or their favorite search engine or their favorite nlm. And it's very useful. It's one of the great things I was. The best thing I was born with is like an almost unique last name. There's only 10 of us in the world, so Togelius, that's me on Twitter, X and everything else. Oh, wow.
- [42:48]
Eric Sufert
And actually one thing I want to highlight, and I'll link it in the show notes is like you wrote a really great post and I don't know, a couple months ago about how, you know, you had a productive, successful career in AI research without being an expert in math. Right. Without having, you know, done.
- [43:02]
Julian Togelius
No, no, no, no, no, no. Without knowing any maths. That's what it was.
- [43:06]
Eric Sufert
Okay. Without knowing. I didn't, you know, I didn't want to feel like I was exaggerating, but I actually really, I really appreciated that post. Because I think it. A lot of this can be very inaccessible and I think a lot of people wrongly so get turned off from AI completely because they'll take a look at a paper and they'll say I have no ide. It's just, it's like alien language. And, and I think the reality is like I understand why, you know, the default is to just go to the, to the math. But like the reality is there's not. I don't think. And you know, people would probably argue with this but like I don't think certainly to read these papers there's like some math you need to know and you, you could teach that yourself to yourself. Like now maybe to do the most cutting edge research and like quantization, maybe it's different but like I think to read a lot of this work and to understand it, it. There's a. It's a lot of reusable. It's a lot of the math is like once you get familiar with it, you just reused all the time. You regular. Oh, okay, that's a softmax. I get what that is.
- [44:00]
Julian Togelius
Yeah, yeah. A lot of the math in the research paper is just completely gratuitous. It doesn't need to be right. You can just get it out and focus on the ideas. The real problem is that a lot of research papers are badly written because a lot of people don't know how to write.
- [44:13]
Eric Sufert
Right, right.
- [44:14]
Julian Togelius
And that's. We should just, you know, we should demand that they get good at this. But. Yeah, but it's perfectly fine to just ask to sort of explain it like you're like five year old or a golden retriever or something.
- [44:29]
Eric Sufert
Julian, thank you so much. I hope you enjoy your weekend. Thank you for slotting me in on a Friday afternoon.
- [44:33]
Julian Togelius
Hey, thank you so much Eric. And it was great. And enjoy your weekend too.