[dsign]

The way I see it, AI is going to change the world radically. It could be for the worse, the better, or a mix of both, but in my mind there's no doubt.

We are only five or six years into the leap LLMs represent. For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wireless technologies started picking up. It took so long not because of the physics of radio waves required time to mature and improve, but because everything else needed to profit from it did require time.

To me, LLMs are not so much AI as it is a building block. Radiowaves maybe, or the equivalent of transistors. We are already seeing that it's possible to chain LLMs into agents. Currently, price is a strict limiting factor for coding and agents.It's probably fine-ish if all you want is Claude Code or Codex, but there are many other possible compositions of LLMs that most people don't dare to experiment with. For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost. Were prices of inference hardware go down and inference algorithms keep improving, I'm convinced (and afraid) we would see things very difficult to imagine today.

[A_D_E_P_T]

> For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost.

Hah, I'm actually working on just this problem.

Cost isn't the issue. There are only so many coherent (in context) responses and scenarios, that you don't need an LLM to generate text in the game, in real time. Instead, you can have LLMs build a vast corpus of "atoms" (dialog messages, fragments, cues, etc.) that can be stringed together in a deterministic way in response to player input. These can also be pre-screened and subjected to various tests prior to implementation.

To a player interacting in the game, a system like this would seem functionally indistinguishable from generated text within the game's designed interaction envelope. And it has huge advantages: Although it can expose seams if the player breaks character and decides to probe it, it won't be exploitable the way an LLM would be.

[squidsoup]

> LLMs to drive NPC dialog

Far more interested in dialog and characters developed by a writer - simulation is boring

[Jtarii]

>Far more interested in dialog and characters developed by a writer - simulation is boring

It entirely depends on the situation. Background NPCs that just have conversations among themselves would be a great use of LLMs to make the world feel more immersive. Obviously you never want to directly engage the player with LLM generated writing.

[petesergeant]

> For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost.

I have deployed LLM-based NPCs in production for a reasonably popular game (100k DAU), so this is news to me.

[senordevnyc]

I count the start of this AI era as when ChatGPT was released, so we’re actually only 3.5 years in.

And we’re only about a year into the agentic coding era portion of that era.

[48terry]

> The way I see it, AI is going to change the world radically. It could be for the worse, the better, or a mix of both, but in my mind there's no doubt.

Worthless statement. Wow, you suspect something can make things better, worse, or both? That's a keen insight there.

> For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wireless technologies started picking up.

We are still so early.

I mean, we have advertised them in multiple super bowls, have companies that basically own tech news (incredulous journalists will repeat any stupid insane shit a CEO wants to say), that say they're valued at over a trillion dollars and nobody with the power to argue those finances seems willing to do anything but agree. We have built hundreds and hundreds of acres of data centers (and made deals for data centers that are never going to happen) that demand *billions* per month. They are devouring all the silicon to where people are visibly seeing the price of hardware double, triple, more in price. Work places insist on employees using AI (then pulled back because it turns out this stuff costs money and it's not fun anymore when it's not subsidized).

But we just need more time, more eyes, more people looking at it.

Where in the radio wave timeline did this happen?