FAQ
AI People is a sandbox game where you create and play scenarios with AI NPCs that interact with each other, the environment, and you! They learn, feel emotions, pursue goals, dream, and dynamically craft an emergent AI-generated story.
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Drawing from our experience with Space Engineers, our initial plan is to launch an alpha version that showcases the core capabilities of our AI Director technology.
Following that, we intend to roll out regular updates, which will enrich the game with new features and content, all while actively engaging with our player community
In any given scenario, players can typically expect around 5 NPCs to be present. While we will offer a broader range of official characters, players also will have the capability to add and share their own creations. We're not targeting large-scale simulations at the moment, as the current LLM capacities would not sufficiently support it.
At the alpha release, players will have the opportunity to a few primary scenarios set in a modern-day theme, showcasing our novel AI Director technology. Although our game is setting/theme agnostic — with aspirations to support scenarios from ancient times to the present and extend to futuristic and fantastical settings — more official scenarios will be introduced as development continues. Moreover, players will be equipped with tools to craft and share their own unique scenarios, unrestricted by a specific theme or era.
AI NPCs in the game are simulated by Large Language Models (LLMs). These LLMs are integrated into our in-house cognitive architecture, encompassing features like long-term memory, working memory, episodic memory, and spatial reasoning.
Additionally, our NPCs can interact with the game world through various actuators and tools, and they can adapt and learn based on feedback. This is all orchestrated by our AI Director, which ensures that the emergent stories evolve into compelling and intriguing plots.
The core idea is straightforward. The game generates prompts that include descriptions of the scene, agents, their bios, and any memories relevant to the current context. These prompts are then sent to the LLM, and the output delineates the actions the agents should take. The game then executes these actions. Any new memories are then post-processed and stored in various formats like long-term memory, working memory, episodic memory, and so on, ensuring they're available for future prompts. If an action generated by the LLM fails, this is flagged as error feedback, prompting the LLM to offer a correction.
The real challenge lies in ensuring this entire process results in NPCs behaving realistically in a manner that's both predictable yet surprising. We want narratives that unfold intriguingly, where players genuinely impact the lives of NPCs, and unexpected events or plot twists emerge.
Another objective is to optimize the number of LLM tokens to ensure minimal delays and negligible inference costs.
At their core, our AI NPCs function as LLM agents. While they share similarities with models like AutoGPT or BabyAGI, we aim to ensure they operate seamlessly within our proprietary game environment. Additionally, our NPCs feature dynamic and expandable memory capabilities, allowing them to learn continually.
Here’s is a presentation from June 2023 with an older version of our AI Director
Yes, NPCs can experience hallucinations. Occasionally, they might reference events or actions, such as giving you an item, that have not actually taken place in the game world.
These moments are not intentional features but aspects we continually work to improve upon.
We employ a variety of models. Our prototyping predominantly occurs on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-Turbo. In earlier phases, we relied on GPT-3, GPT-J, and GPTNeo. For enhanced quality and alignment with our game world and narrative, we're fine-tuning some of the open-source models. This will ensure that our models can produce diverse story content seamlessly, unbiased by someone’s political views. Our goal is to run the LLM directly on the player's device to reduce inference costs and increase the player’s privacy.
Detailed pricing information will be announced later. For now, it's important to note that our AI NPCs operate on LLMs (large language models) housed in data centers.
Given the significant infrastructure costs, especially considering that the game generates thousands of LLM tokens every hour, we're actively exploring solutions to scale this operation efficiently.
No, however, Marek Rosa, the CEO and founder of Keen Software House and creator of Space Engineers, serves as the Creative Director for AI People. The remainder of the team is comprised of professionals from various game development studios, as well as experienced AI researchers and engineers.
Given the potential of AI People to pioneer a new genre of intelligent NPCs, it's essential to have a team that's well-versed in both AI research and game development.
Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration, and survival in space and on planets. Players can build spaceships, space stations, planetary outposts, and even pilot ships through space to explore planets or gather resources. The game offers both creative and survival modes, emphasizing physics-based realism, where everything in the game can be assembled, disassembled, damaged, or destroyed.
Space Engineers has seen consistent engagement since its release, with over 5 million copies sold. One notable aspect of the game is its active modding community. It has the 4th largest Workshop on Steam, hosting over 500,000 mods, ships, stations, and worlds.
This extensive user-generated content has contributed to the game's adaptability and appeal over its decade-long presence in the market.
With the emergence of LLMs, we pivoted from our previous AGI strategies to fully embrace LLM-powered agents equipped with long-term memory. Introducing AI NPCs into a game provides an ideal environment for testing and refining these models. Games offer a forgiving space where errors come at a low cost, and experimentation is encouraged. They allow us to harmonize the demands of a use case with the existing capabilities of AI. Plus, we genuinely enjoy the process of game creation!
However, this game is just one facet of our initiatives at GoodAI. We're also spearheading projects like the Charlie Mnemonic - a personal assistant with long-term memory, LTM Benchmark and LTM systems, and the GoodAI Groundstation—an AI-driven platform for managing drone fleets (example here).
We're highly interested in the potential of UGC, such as modding, introducing new scenarios, designing character visuals, and developing distinct bios/personalities, as well as originating stories.
While many GPT-powered NPCs are limited to conversations, NPCs in AI People go beyond, emerging as advanced behavioral entities. They actively perceive their environment, move within it, interact with the world using items and tools, manage their inventories, physically interact with fellow NPCs, and choose to converse with other NPCs and the player. On top of this, our AI Director orchestrates their behavior into a convincing narrative.
Traditional game NPCs are scripted and predictable. AI People introduces LLM-powered NPCs with individual personalities, biographies, long-term memory, and learning abilities.
These NPCs actively observe their surroundings, establish goals, interact with objects, items, and other characters, and adapt based on feedback from both players and the environment. This dynamic gameplay continuously evolves with fresh scenarios. Beyond mere dialogue, they showcase a comprehensive behavioral AI, reflecting their unique thoughts and plans.
Initially, we are targeting the PC platform. However, we may consider expanding to other platforms in the future, including mobile, console, VR, and AR.
Currently, our focus is on delivering a rich single-player experience, with the bonus of players being able to create and share content via our workshop. While multiplayer isn't in our immediate plans, it's a logical next step we might explore in the future.
Currently, the game is rated 18+. However, we're exploring the possibility of a kid-friendly version once we've implemented enhanced filters and a parental lock.
AI People blends elements of Simulation Sandbox, Adventure/RPG, and Level/Scenario building genres.
AI People is built on the Unity Engine.
Founded in 2014, GoodAI is a company initiated with a $10M personal investment from Marek Rosa.
Its overarching ambition is to develop general artificial intelligence designed to automate cognitive tasks across sectors like science, technology, business, and more.
GoodAI is a sister company to Keen Software House, the developer behind Space Engineers.
There are a couple of key reasons. Firstly, developing middleware in a vacuum, without a direct connection to the end product (the game), can lead to misguided directions and extended feedback loops. We believe in creating with purpose and direct application. Secondly, our passion lies in game development rather than middleware creation.
That said, as our game progresses, we're open to the idea of licensing our AI Director technology to other game studios. It'd be thrilling to see our tech come to life in other titles, particularly those we deeply admire.
The AI NPCs are designed to emulate behavior based on their training dataset.
It's important to understand that they aren't intrinsically biased or offensive, but they mimic patterns observed in their training data, which reflects human behavior. It's a mirror to us; any imperfection in their behavior is, in essence, a reflection of human imperfections.
The NPCs in AI People are indeed advanced and designed to emulate thinking, feeling, a sense of aliveness, and even reactions that might resemble pain. However, it's essential to understand that they operate on a digital substrate, fundamentally different from human consciousness's biological substrate. While they exhibit behaviors that mimic emotion, thought, and pain-like reactions, their "experience" is not analogous to human experience - similar to movie characters who appear lifelike yet are completely imaginary. They are a testament to the marvels of technology and our ability to create lifelike interactions, but they remain entities of code, responding based on intricate algorithms. Ethical considerations are paramount, and engaging with them with an understanding of their unique nature is essential.