Global Illumination appears to have been working on a browser-based multiplayer Minecraft clone (https://www.biomes.gg/), not anything explicitly related to AI content generation.
Odd acquisition choice unless OpenAI is going to do an unexpected pivot.
Their statement is pretty clear about what they see as the value add:
> OpenAI has acquired the team at Global Illumination, a company founded by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey Flynn. The entire team has joined OpenAI to work on our core products including ChatGPT. Global Illumination is a company that has been leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences. The team previously designed and built products early on at Instagram and Facebook and have also made significant contributions at YouTube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies. We’re very excited for the impact they’ll have here at OpenAI.
Seems like a very standard acquihire. There's no indication that any of Global Illumination's projects will continue, or that OpenAI will get into the gaming business.
> Seems like a very standard acquihire. There's no indication that any of Global Illumination's projects will continue, or that OpenAI will get into the gaming business.
Deploying AI agents to 3D worlds seems like a huge potential market. Not just for gaming, but as a test bed for real world 3D SLAM.
Rendering scenes in 3D with AI seems like another huge potential market, at the intersection of movies and gaming.
This is both at once. I think it'd be a mistake to put them to work on ChatGPT.
I saw a demo of a Skyrim mod on Youtube [1], where they wired the dialog screen with NPCs in the town of Windhelm up with the OpenAI API.
Each character had all their Bethesda-written dialog fed to the LLM as a starting prompt, so each one communicated with the player within the bounds of their authored identity, and knew what that character was written to know.
The human player used freeform in-game text-to-LLM as input to talk to the people in the town square. The latency was large, but not more than a few seconds.
He was able to walk up to someone and say things like "Where do you live? Who is your father?" .... latency pause ... "Oh me? I live in the Cloud District. It's where all of us Battleborn clan live, of course!"
The real kicker of this demo was that they passed the LLM-generated response dialog in to a deep-fake model trained on each character's original voice actors (since the corpus in Skyrim is vast, this ended up quite accurate).
All of this was a major generational shift for gaming as a whole. I had just witnessed the first time a video game player could actually TALK to an NPC, in a fully unstructured and unscripted fashion, while each character remained as in-character as the original game's authors intended.
So maybe this purchase by OpenAI is about something like that. Building NPCs for Biomes.gg that you can actually talk to.
>The real kicker of this demo was that they passed the LLM-generated response dialog in to a deep-fake model trained on each character's original voice actors (since the corpus in Skyrim is vast, this ended up quite accurate).
The voice is added in post through editing. The voice generation wasn't performed in real time. Still, a very interesting project.
Well.. but it's relatively easy to do that. It's combining the OpenAI API, Whisper, and Eleven Labs (or similar). Not trivial, but you don't need to hire a whole team.
Maybe not, but frequently hiring a team that has accomplished a significant percentage of a goal is a better choice than trying to retask existing folks, or to grow a new product set outside of core competency.
Scroll down on the post, not the comments, and you'll see where the parent pulled their quote from, which you said you "don't see any of that written there," well, it's written there.
I'm honestly at a loss for what you want from this conversation. What "nonsense" are you even talking about? You said you don't see the quote written there (I presume on the website) so I told you to scroll down and you'll see the quote. That's all I was saying, but now you're asking what the point of the quote was, like, how should I know? Ask the parent.
>Their statement is pretty clear about what they see as the value add
And add a quote to support that.
I argue that I do not see what the value added is from that quote, (and I still don't, btw).
You tell me to scroll down ... ??? What? I don't need to scroll down to read a 4-5 sentence quote.
You then start talking about the article, which is not what I'm not referring to, I'm talking about the quote.
I ask "what's the point of the quote then?", as in, if GP wanted to point its argument at something else in TFA why would it choose to quote this instead? And you also didn't grasp that.
Their founder and CEO created The Algorithm at Instagram. Rest of the team is super strong too. Makes a lot of sense for OpenAI to acquire a team at the intersection of AI and consumer products.
Seems pretty obvious they decided to be a product maker. This is them doubling down.
They started out obviously doing API stuff. chatGPT was some sort of proof-of-concept or whatever but once it went viral, the obvious pivot is to be a product maker. The margins on ChatGPT+ is way better than an API, as every ChatGPT clone will tell you. A viral product is really hard to make, never mind make and throw away to focus on lower margin corporate customers.
They seem to have a great vision now - make a good product (WIP, but rapidly iterating), and sell the underlying models to Microsoft to offer as an API for the residual value they can’t capture directly. This should make it clear that if you’re selling a Chatbot off of their APIs, they’re planning to compete with you.
100% Yep. I like OpenAI but I think their peril will be due to lack of vision more than anything else. Other players are catching up. IMHO they should stick to providing AI infrastructure.
That being said, considering Microsoft's investment, the most likely outcome is that OpenAI will move into the consumer business while being the research arm for Azure.
don’t let those darn things trick you into thinking they are people. legally it gets murky, but they aren’t people. it is all just a ploy for emotional connection for the sake of taking advantage of you.
> I think they have to decide if they want to be an API provider or a product-maker.
> Businesses don't tend to do well when they directly compete with their clients.
They are devoting enormous resources to studying LLM safety - my assumption is they’re trying to push the limits of what’s possible with autonomous agents before someone else does.
If you can build a bot to beat an open world game as complex as Minecraft, you’re pretty close to automating an enormous amount of jobs and potentially doing some destructive stuff. This seems like an aquihire to kickstart that initiative.
Full disclosure this is a complete assumption, could just as well be on the whims of Sama. I’m skeptical of the other answers here - OpenAI is perfectly capable of hiring some of the best PM’s in the world without having to buy a company.
People have been training ML to play Minecraft via text commands for a while. Having access to the guts of a clone makes perfect sense given their past and present projects.
Just speculating here but... More than just _playing_ a game, I could see OpenAI wanting to go after the 3D assets market by letting players generate levels, items, and perhaps even NPCs, simply by describing them. It might be easier to generate voxel-based assets first though, which would make Minecraft-esque games a logical first target (perhaps just behind 2D games, but I suspect the market isn't as big there).
I'd be really curious how this training works. Is it done on a real-time minecraft application, or did they build a custom game engine that mimics minecraft but without any movement delay and without any graphics so the speed of training could be thousands of times faster?
The market is littered with clones of minecraft and has been since before it was even done being made. None of them have even been remotely a threat to Minecraft. Turns out you need way more than just a bunch of blocks.
Odd acquisition choice unless OpenAI is going to do an unexpected pivot.