Yesterday, xAI announced their newest reasoning model that tops all existing evals. They did this from scratch in less than 2 years which is inspiring. The thing that really caught my attention is the mini-announcement by Elon Musk that xAI is starting a gaming studio.

What could this look like? Creating interesting mods for GTA-5 or even better, generating endless fantasy worlds. I expect games like ‘Ready Player One’ to be ubiquitous in the coming years. Virtual worlds are already being created by WorldLabs, DeepMind’s Veo and some others. Frankly, I think this is the best time to work on creating something like a VR based game studio that leverages the recent advances in 3D foundation models. To quote Steve Jobs quoting Wayne Gretzky, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. It’s very clear that the puck is in creating 3D virtual realistic worlds which can manipulated by multiple agents at various times and keep all of those changes in memory. This leads to questions like whether we want the worlds to be one which be altered and return to that space or do we want different spawned worlds whenever the player presses play. There will be a demand for both. Maybe something like Minecraft where a user can create their world and invite other players on the internet to explore it. VR Minecraft combined with generative AI looks like a good starting point in the space.

The time to jump into a particular technology is not when it is fully formed, rather the most exciting (and high-leverage) time is when everyone on the planet is figuring things out. The tech companies are trying to use AI for their “optimal” use-cases, startups are looking at ways to cash-in on the latest technologies, and consumers slowly but surely dipping their toes in this world makes this the perfect time, opportunity and space to work in. There is literally opportunity everywhere, from getting a PhD where there is a potential to do fundamental science to develop even more advanced models, to starting companies that make use of the already available tech-stack, I would argue this is one of the best times to be alive in history of the human civilization. If someone would’ve given me a choice to spawn in the world, I most definitely would choose this time.

So perhaps, I will after-all put effort into this idea of mine for 3D realistic games before everyone figures it out.