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Virtual Beings and Virtual Societies Summit

agenda

Welcome @edward-saatchi and @hubert-thielblot

  • we need to embrace the theme of life-vs-dark
  • transcripts reveal: platitudes
  • ai communities can be as messy and diverse as human ones

First Panel

  • members: @tejas-kulkarni @vish-hari @kevin-fischer @robert-yang
  • @robert-yang: Bender Test
  • @kevin-fischer: even children's fairy tales grapple with elements of darkness
  • @vish-hari: wants to bring punk rock back into tech; giving users the option for violent/dark stories;
  • @tejas-kulkarni: suppressed emotions in society... let people explore their imaginations; content moderation layers
  • @vish-hari: embodiment! june park's paper in 3d, co-founder Peggy's viral
  • @robert-yang: corpus collosum severance means left and right brains are more independent;
    • agent failure mode is when they don't realize what they're doing, or the think they're doing something they're not
  • @kevin-fischer conversations can have action space; operations over your own internal mental states; want to induce a target state; in the same way you ahve planning and action space in the world, is conversation design
  • @vish-hari: how do you constrain the action space
  • @edward-saatchi: control vs freedom = authorial intent vs emergence; need to give players tools, or better insight into to why?
  • @kevin-fischer: design agentic action spaces; authorial intent is with the designers
  • @vish-hari: constrain action spaces through consent frameworks and value alignment
    • @june-park controls agents with long-term memory. we often can't measure systematically what emerges; we need a new set of tools to predict how LTM or whatever will change
  • @tejas-kulkarni text adventure games means text is enough to capture abstractions of emergent social dynamics;
  • @edward-saatchi: how do you think about interactions
  • @tejas-kulkarni: goal is to build a world simulator; LLM model doesn't give itself to code injection; temporal sampling for "enough representation"; guassian, images, etc come together under a huge
  • @edward-saatchi: have any of your ai's been "embodied" by persuading a human to take action. "we are their embodiment"
  • @vish-hari "we haven't experimented on humans yet, but if you want to volunteer, let me know."
  • @robert-yang: a true agent has their own desires

audience questions

Sim Francisco

  • the simulation of something known resonates;
  • for Sim Francisco some turns are emergent, some are driven by humans
  • "too boring" when fully emergent;
  • interactivity vs passivity: "best first way to connect with a simulation" is to watch what's happening.
  • simulations don't have conflict
  • "how do you program comedy": people are stuck in the boring vanilla mental model. "we're going there"

@john-gaeta

  • @john-gaeta:
    • "I enjoy your provocations. Kinda scared by 'em, but enjoyed"
    • where to go? compelled by cinema/storytelling/expressing ideas. was lucky enough to get drawn into filmmaking...
    • all science fiction is a prelude, a giant suggestion box; builders looks inside these fictional works to find emotional/memory motivation
  • @edward-saatchi: did virtual humans of the matrix compel you towards Unreal and Ilm and Inworld : check https://store.steampowered.com/app/2199920/Inworld_Origins/
  • @john-gaeta: "the construct" is more interesting than the holodeck. working on "volumetric capture", @keanu only makes sense on a 1-to-1. "uncanny valley" is not just visual, it's big. With LLMs you get to "what's natual", but it's non-verbal, neurochemical.
  • doing robots is a good start. in star wars, droids are lovable because they love their humans;
  • how will folks trains themselves? language doesn't capture it. often language counter-captures it. skeptical that words can unpack what you are.
  • agree with flaws leading to authenticity.
  • i'm talking to you, but inside my head i have a faint picture.
  • @edward-saatchi: "why do we need words? word conceal?"
  • @john-gaeta: it's wonderful to sculpt a story. "the one button thing will fill the internet with 10,000-fold noise and junk" - we need "a new form of live ops"
  • "some kind of weighting situation" for fight or flight nuance
  • the stuff that compells us is what keeps us guessing; the greatest game and fictions always twist you the whole way through; starts with human intuition. "we're doing all this to land at human again." everyone has a different opinion on what consitutes a beautiful virtual being/society.
  • @vish-hari: how do we bring stories and engineering together?
  • @john-gaeta: there's not a lot of people who can do both; i've been lucky to be surrounded by engineers; best chemistry is instinctual and analytical. if we see things we don't like in our platforms... we haven't connected the dots; when there's healthy tension; you can play with the dark side, art-wise; but we have to stay on the light side; there's way more dark side people that need to be mitigated;
  • messaging has to be "how to amplify and empower"

Panel #2: AI Gamesmaker

  • @joshua-johnson @hillary-mason @eugene @harvey-michael-pratt @stephan-bugaj @eugenia
  • @harvey-michael-pratt: if you've entertained building a video game, now is the time; interested in games
  • @hillary-mason: opportunity to create new experiences; our approach is collaborative and rigorous; you have to design structures around what these models are really great for. "imagine your favorite author, could be your GM"
  • shift the creation of what they see until the moment they see it. in skyrim, side quests don't change the world; players can change their world, their social statuses.
  • @stephan-bugaj: Rival Peak and Silent Hill Ascenscion
  • @eugenia is wearing a shirt that says "a machine beautiful enough that a soul would want to live in it"
    • most products use off-the-shelf LLMs, audience is used to chatgpt; edge is in building a different conversation;
  • in Silent Hill Ascenscion the monster represent trauma;
  • @joshua-johnson: [3d at runtime] we've been able to scale up 3d generation from text prompts within 10-15 seconds; it's going to move very quickly; still some limitation on world building;

question

  • @hillary-mason: what matters isn't stories, but match your resonant stories and friends;
  • @stephan-bugaj: if everything goes well, we'll go back to "art and play" and get rid of content
  • @harvey-michael-pratt : harris identified compelling; symbolic structures tend towards entropy, which would be dystopic
    • "generally, the audience shouldn't now whether it's ai or non-ai"
  • @eugene: with our web3 game, tried to hide the web3 tech as much as possible; "local compute, localized LLMs"; Ai Dungeon
  • @hillary-mason: infrastructure costs;
  • @stephan-bugaj: ai shovel-ware is going to push us to saturation and force us to be good again;
  • consensus: we're headed for the dopamine death spiral; deluge of content; on-edge will help you sift through huge amount of content; eventually, virtual beings will be more compelling than the real thing
  • @harvey-michael-pratt: edtech! make learning as compelling as fortnite
  • @eugenia: nobody is talking about qualitative, which means bad things
  • @hillary-mason: ttrpg is an optimistic space;

@will-wright

  • Proxi

  • if you woke up with different memories, you'd be a different person. What kind of maps could we build of your psychology. Conscious stream of thought is a trickle on top of a lot of other "unseen consciousness"

  • people have parts of their personality than they can't articulate or communicate, but maybe you could see them through a special microscope machine if you fed it memories and behaviour

  • think about actors, how they seem so real; narrative side; no game ever went wrong over-estimating the narcissim of the players;

  • the sims became a scaffolding for fantasy; a spreadsheet of what-ifs, or ice-breakers;

  • you as a platform for gaming; storytelling and play are flipsides of the same coin

  • as a kid, loved building models; apple simulator let model dynamic systems, which pulled him into simulation; toys of the world so you can understand more of the world;

  • sims was really more of a dollhouse

  • proxi more of a high-tech scrapbook

  • looking forward to a "digital audience" as a tool; million-ai focus group, and have them automatically tune the game; games have an opportunity to be much more malleable;

  • The User Is an Illusion

  • "consciousness" is one of these useless terms like "art";

  • consciousness is more of a timestamp if you have to build a narrative in real time, that basically consciousness any narrative form has to leave room for the audience to fill. like Scott mcleods space between the gutters

industry (venture) voice

investors

  • @james-buckhouse at Sequoia
  • @amber-atherton at Patron w
  • @aaron-sisto for First Spark Ventures
  • @jack-soslow for Andreessen Horowitz Jack... playful constraints Aron new type of studio James... great day to wake up. language is a game between me and i Jack. character.ai, the promenade, suck up, digi Isa high quality Aron what does control mean.... free energy principle. promenade guy... use llm to create ontology npcs isn't why people play games never be alone when you're playing always about the inner character with an arc delta in emotion in every scene much harder problem is inner character investors looking for an outlier... at sequoia @amber-atherton patron looking for core player community with a wedge. E.g. valorant Aron deep tech... strongest teams have experience in the industry good engineers right sized idea for right sized founder plus business and product skills Aron... do the new thing James... agentic work flow. different, not merely better. increase tour def of what game is. unshut content deluge - curation. distribution advantage.