David Friedberg: all right everybody welcome back to ai basics ai basics this is where we go over the fundamentals the basic things that founders need to know and we do this for legal uh we do it for finance and now we're doing it for ai you can find all these episodes this week in startups.com slash basics and ai basics is brought to you in partnership with our friends at google cloud i'm really excited about today's guest because we're going to talk a little bit about how ai is impacting video games with us today amir sadagian he is the founder and ceo of astrocade this is an app that allows you to easily create original video games and share them with your

SPEAKER_02: friends welcome to the program amir thanks jason thank you for having me man i'm very excited about

David Friedberg: this well you are in a category that i am seeing all over social media which is this is games that were state of the art i don't know maybe 10 or 20 years ago people are now able to fork to build using ai and you have a platform to do that so tell us a little bit about what your

SPEAKER_04: product and service does and why you built it i can tell a little bit about my story but astrocade

Chamath Palihapitiya: basically you said it really well it's a platform that anyone can create any interactive experiences games is a large category of interactive experiences but there are a lot more like education content companions that we saw a lot of different interactive content but this the core of it is any kind of content that is interactive so anyone can create those content the way they can create it and the reason i say anyone can create it is through natural language because you can just simply describe you can just describe any kind of content any kind of game and the ai our ai system actually generates them and the other exciting part of astrocade is once you create those kind of content you can basically just press a publish button and publish it to a feed of content very similar to tiktok and youtube there's a feed of content that all this content is generated with uh from creators across the world we have more than 100 000 creators from various countries more than 100 countries um creating this kind of content and publishing it which is super super exciting and yeah the

David Friedberg: the the it's astrocade.com yeah yeah and so when you look at the site i mean there's just all the greatest hits that you can imagine from you know motorcycle games to uh person versus person fighter games all of these different formats but you do them in a format that looks like uh tiktok where you can scroll through them if you don't like this game you just scroll down to the next one and you can play a casual game scroll down to the next one play a military game scroll down to the next one uh play an archery game i mean it's just incredible the creativity people have and the idea of creating a video game people would have to go to college they would have to do internships you would be five six seven years into training to actually make a game and now you're telling me they can just do a prompt make a game and then publish it and then play with the friends yeah yes exactly it's hard making

Chamath Palihapitiya: games is really really hard and and i will tell you a little bit why this is so exciting and it actually um i think i've been accidentally being trained to build astrocade um during my entire life i can tell you a little bit like so the co-founder of me it's one of my brother is actually my cto and co-founder um and we've we've been raised in four different continents we were born and raised in spain for five years five years in zimbabwe 10 years in iran and then we came 13 years in u.s u.s has been the longest place we've lived um and the the interesting thing i think when you when you're raised this way the interesting thing is you just see so many different cultures every country you go is completely

SPEAKER_22: different the people are different the culture is different how the food the traditions the the

David Friedberg: topography and the the architecture everything is unique and it's so beautiful because each of

SPEAKER_24: these places have been built by different people with different cultures with different mindsets

Chamath Palihapitiya: and i think one of the biggest things we had was from the beginning we were all by the way gamers we were like hardcore gamers like i'm now more of a casual gamer um i'll call it even a player rather than gamer because when you say game like it's a different um visual um yeah and and we were like okay like why is this not happening with the kind of like the gaming and interactive content and it boils down to what you just said actually because creating a kind of a game it's so hard you have to go get educated you and if you need to have multiple set of skills or build a studio to do it it needs coding right you need to know how to build assets you need to build how to tune the game how the game field is very very hard i need to also understand the psychology of player right to make something really fun right so basically what we did is we removed all these barriers right we removed all these barriers and thanks to generative ai uh we started the company in 2022 um and the reason again is another part of my life i've been in ai 2013 i did my phd at stanford ai when ai was actually not cool nobody was talking about ai at the time um and in 2022 um we saw that the technology is actually getting to a place that you can actually generate these interactive worlds it took us a while to basically improve the technology to be able to make fun content but that's that's basically the reason

SPEAKER_22: um and we built this technology it's a funny story i think this is something um i think you would enjoy um so the first office uh for us was in in my in-law suite in my house and we had a fridge in the middle so and one of my founding engineers one of them said like hey let's just order watermelon juice um so we ordered a bunch of these small watermelon juice we filled up the entire row of the fridge and two days passed the entire row got finished it finished so and they wanted more so we were like okay this is like we need to be more economically viable so we went and bought these bigger half a liter bottles of watermelon juice and we put in the fridge it's tasty it's a tasty addiction yes great thing um two weeks passed nobody touched these bottles from from small bottles that like everyone finished we made them just pick here and put them in the fridge and the demand completely disappeared so it's funny my brother was like okay let's do experiment so he then went and took this watermelon and put cups right next to them just this small change now people started actually consuming watermelon and and we were watching this and like he was like okay this is exactly the story of astrocade the the friction we removed a big barrier from the users and suddenly demand popped up like now everyone is making your watermelon juice yeah right um now everyone is creating games sorry uh

SPEAKER_30: lon made a game uh well in under 10 minutes yeah and i i have one that's being made as we speak in the

David Friedberg: in there i have a spaceship game where i go eat donuts um but what's really nice is today a lot of the concepts in are already baked into the language model so if you say i want to create a spaceship game it has the history of video games it has reviews of every game ever made it has people writing blog posts or podcasts about video game culture what they like about games so how does i just put in one sentence i want a spaceship that goes and collects donuts um how does it how do you build the harness and the knowledge around it to then decide how complex the game is how the levels of the game all that stuff you know and is that something where you want the users to front load that or you want them to just make a simple game and then refine on the back end because refining ai generated content has always been

SPEAKER_32: a bit difficult but here you're doing coding so maybe it's not as difficult you tell me that's a very

Chamath Palihapitiya: good point uh we actually try to find a really good balance here you could let ai to do everything and you can put the user in the middle and like try to ask them to refine the experience what we learned actually through the past two and a half years of like really working closely with our creators is ai is still not there yet ai cannot make a full game it can copy the games that they have been trained on like flappy bird you say i want a flappy bird it can generate because it's been so many flappy bird code that the ai has been trained on and it can generate but if you could a moment you start making actually a new experience or some modification to an experience actually ai struggles a lot yeah that's where our creators come actually most of our like um full games they've been through many iterations and many like literally wishes we call it wish prompt we call the prompts wishes they go through multiple iteration of wishes to become really really good uh i can show you do you want me to show you a demo of

SPEAKER_10: one of these things absolutely absolutely and it's really interesting because you have thought about i'm

David Friedberg: in my interface right now hey is this a simple game or an advanced game what's the acceleration the rotation speed you know just what the obvious things are i should change but here you're making

Chamath Palihapitiya: arrow storm so let's see uh how you do this and this is actually this is uh from one of our creators uh oh one of your craters our good creators yeah i just copied for the save of the demo so this is a like a game that you have to basically go kill enemies you can upgrade your uh arrow and spot okay actually level up look at the oh you've leveled up don't wanna i don't

David Friedberg: want to mess up your streak here these games are so addicting too so does it understand um gamification natively and can you tell it hey i want to do gamification here i want to have these levels and

SPEAKER_45: you know uh equipment upgrades etc or does it just guess that you want that ai can give you suggestions

SPEAKER_22: but i think the best way that works is like your own taste and choosing it ai can guide you you can say hey add gamification to my game but like most of the time it's not a good gamification it gives

Chamath Palihapitiya: you ideas but i think you have to choose so this creator actually chose this kind of gamification and and even these numbers needs to be tuned so one of the hard parts that even with ai in the loop is every number and every tuning matters if you change this 25 to 50 suddenly game becomes so boring because you can just go on winning so human still needs to play it like you need to create it play test it go back and iterate on it so i'm going to choose this like and i'm going to continue so this is basically the game look at the clouds on top look at every all of these i mean the fidelity is

David Friedberg: amazing this is like if i was on a nintendo switch or my iphone playing a game it's looks like a modern

Chamath Palihapitiya: you know casual game on an iphone or exactly like six two years ago three years ago this would take like five people six months to bake this game with a lot of budget so let me show you actually how this game

SPEAKER_58: was made okay so amir i see on the left hand side you have the chat window uh just like you would have

David Friedberg: a conversation with any uh large language model and then in the middle we have uh the game and on the

SPEAKER_12: right we have game settings yeah exactly exactly so and i'm going to explain so the main way is to

Chamath Palihapitiya: natural language so you describe hey in the menu put shop button on the play button whatever you can say resize it make the shop button blue so do you see actually creator is like interacting with ai but a lot of things that i mentioned needs tuning and natural language sometimes is not the best way to do it right for example if you want to fine tune the flower occurrences you don't want to go like back and forth on like say 0.25 then go to tell you a 0.3 so sometimes it's easier to just like tune it with

David Friedberg: like yeah put in a number yeah make it very explicit because large language models are non-deterministic they're taking a gas that's the power of them as to what you want because they can fill in the gaps for you but sometimes you know in a game you want it to be deterministic you get three lives this you know boss has a thousand hit points and your sword does 10 hit points of damage each time whatever

SPEAKER_22: it happens to be exactly and you want to tune it very quickly so that's basically what we generate also not that ai that is generating the game but it also generates the editor for you so it's actually

Chamath Palihapitiya: edit like generating two things for you um and then you can basically go and tune it and that's basically the what we learned is the optimal way of creating interactive content true natural language and true editor and this is you don't literally the only barrier right now is taste and i call actually i say taste is the new programming language yes well effective experience because large language

David Friedberg: models have been trained on everything there is a reversion to the meme sometimes people to the mean to the average sometimes so people look at web design and if you build something with a large language model sometimes it goes to what is the most common design which is not what you want so then you've got to get a little bit you know more granular and you got to give it a better definition of that and that could happen here hey it looks it looks like every other game sometimes that's good because it's familiar other times if you're trying to do something unique and you want plants versus zombies you actually want a different theme you want a different art style so you got to get more specific in that case

Chamath Palihapitiya: and eventually as you get more games and all those things you can retrain we have a plan to retrain these language models on our data and make them better and better and better over time so it's going to be it's going to be a self-evolving kind of agent or model that just keeps getting

David Friedberg: better at yeah recursive learning based upon what these builders want because these builders are different like i i the first thing i thought of was i want to make a game about our family vacation and then play with my daughter so i was like well we have to be the characters and our bulldogs have to be the characters so do i have the ability to upload assets like pictures of my bulldogs and have a

SPEAKER_22: bulldog video game based on my three bulldogs yeah you can do that you can drive asset you can upload

Chamath Palihapitiya: any images uh we have safety so you can upload anything yes yeah we have like you can basically generate and personalize all these things to whatever scenario and that's the beauty of the world right that's the beauty of the world that's the beauty of games and interactive experiences you can leave it

SPEAKER_12: you can act it and you can personalize it to your taste for the first step this is like one of the

David Friedberg: great things of technology i remember when i first got my printer in the 80s the idea that you could print a birthday card for somebody they were like literally one of the hottest couple of years the top software selling program was a greeting card maker and you would take a eight and a half by 11 and you fold it twice so you could you know make it into like a birthday card and it was incredible everybody was making personalized birthday cards with photos on them etc and that creativity is like sort of what you're bringing here will you be able to eventually publish not just to your website and but maybe even publish to an app store and then you you go from being hey this is for uh consumers to maybe prosumers maybe i could make a living off of this video game and have a

SPEAKER_22: business model inside of it maybe people will pay 99 cents for it funny you say that so so the two two things i want to uh i'll add a little bit to the the the birthday card it's funny you say that because we actually saw one of the application one of the things that people make is interactive birthday cards and they put actually their friends image and send a happy birthday as an interactive experience to their friends which is amazing right and that's something like i didn't know it's going to happen when we start building this technology um but yeah the second part is like what you

Chamath Palihapitiya: mentioned on earning money actually one of the things that i'm just generally very very very excited about ai and recent uh advances of ai is one is just it's just making everything more efficient and like amazing but i think it's the the part that is the most exciting for me is how much new opportunities this new technology is actually creating uh we we have now a lot of people making money from astrocade we have a creator fund we pay people based on number of plays that they get on us on astrocade and and there are people that actually they're full-time building games and attractive experiences on astrocade and making thousands of dollars a month on astrocade um so we are kind of like building a new creator economy similarly like you know how youtube made mr beast absolutely yeah we are seeing the same exact kind of like market dynamics yeah subscribe donations i mean there's

David Friedberg: different modalities to do these kind of things so this is an incredible startup uh where can people find out more and are you hiring for the startup people always come on the program and they need a couple positions filled so we always love to there's somebody out there who would love to i think

Chamath Palihapitiya: join your company and build this we would love that we have a lot of position from product side from recommendation system is very important it's a very hard problem now that you have hundreds of thousands of like content as you surface them that's a big thing we need to uh we are hiring for ai agents post training um a lot of people now ai startups want post training people that's something that we want for training models on interactive experiences um we won't have the best models in the world for generating interactive experiences um so we are hiring for that there are a ton of position and i think the beautiful thing about astrocade is actually the mission is really fun you know jason one of the there were actually two big reasons we started astrocade um and it's very interesting number one um i really care about impact and i think when we started this we wanted to build consumer you can see there's not a lot of people are building consumer companies in today's world like they're most of it is b2b uh we wanted to build a product that touches a billion people and when you want to build a product that touches a billion people um you have to find something that people need it's so innate to humans right like a lot of companies are based on communication but i think the most innate thing to humans and i have a two-year-old and i have a one-month-old and i can see it like literally in them is play play is so universal is a universal human language you learn by a player you kind of like um communicate and socialize by play so play is a big thing um so we are actually building a product that actually makes you create play and actual play yeah again the second thing is about our product is this is very interesting and our mission is actually really fun you're actually sharing fun with the world is mentally games like there's been a lot of research on how much helpful is for your cognitive oh yeah this is a big part of it um what do they call

David Friedberg: plasticity like neuroplasticity um i always like to take up a new sport every year or play a new game and when you learn a even a variation of a poker game as an example you learn how to play plo you have rules you learn from no limit hold them but then you've given four cards and the whole game changes and you have to reconceptualize all the heuristics you know chess doesn't change it would kind of be interesting to make new versions of chess where the game piece has changed in some way or who knows but it is for neuroplasticity neuroplasticity a great thing to do um great job on this and uh thanks you so much for sharing it everybody go to astrocade.com to find out more and thanks to our partners over at google they are doing a great job with gemini i have to say i'm using gemini all the time you know they have code review and all this great stuff the api is fantastic i have to say you there was like two or three things that i had on my vacation that worked really well google local and google maps and gemini have all been tied together now so i was in france i was like i'm here right now i need the best croissant the best pan on chocolate the best hot chocolate whatever i was doing with my daughters and can you put it on a map for me and then i was asking about very specific dishes and it was like oh my god i have this concierge who is working for me 24 hours a day and just put the best pan o chocolate within walking distance of me and the time it opened google's crushing it uh if you if you want to uh find a great panel struggle out in france or uh want to listen to more of these basics obviously go check out gemini great suite of products the the images and the video is also great that's what we default to when we're making fun memes is uh nano banana is incredible but uh for the basic series this week in startups.com slash basics if you're a foundry get all these basics and you got to get nano banana pro yeah i paid the extra 10 bucks or whatever it is a month it's incredible product amir all right we'll see you all next time bye