Monster Hunter on the GO? | AI and Games Digest 08/24

Articles, videos, games, and your questions!

Hello all,

Tommy Thompson

here, and welcome to the inaugural issue of the

AI and Games

Digest! These monthly issues are an excuse for me to discuss things outside of the scope of our regular newsletter. Plus I also wanted to provide another treat for my paying supporters across Substack and on Patreon, and indulge a little.

So in the Digest I’ll be discussing books, articles, and videos that I’m reading/watching that intersect in part, or in full, with the AI and Games remit, but also discuss games I’m playing and generally be a bit more open to conversation and discourse with the community.

Alrighty, let’s get to it!

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Reading and Viewing

Every month I’ll post a bunch of links to books, articles, videos and more that caught my attention over the past month. Here we go!

• The 2024 AI and Games Summer School Vlog [YouTube]:
  Kicking things off with a shameless plug, I got back to making videos last week as I gathered up my footage from the recent trip to the AI and Games Summer School in Malta. I covered a lot of it in the recent newsletter post, but now you get to see it all from my perspective too!

• Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit? [Goldman Sachs]:
  One of the first high-profile reports by an investment bank into the current state of generative AI. It highlights that while there is still a lot of excitement and enthusiasm surrounding generative AI, the sheen is beginning to wear off in the eyes of some corners of investment. This is largely because many AI companies still require millions if not billions of investment for results and revenues that simply don’t add up.
  

• NVIDIA Introduces their own Copilot Clippy: G-Assist [NVIDIA]:
  A couple weeks back, I unpacked the tweet from Microsoft about using Copilot to help you with your gaming. NVIDIA showcase this tech that is a combination of speech recognition and computer vision hooked up to an in-game API and a back-end LLM of knowledge, and then pumps it back to the user via a text-to-speech system. They provided a demo of it running in ARK: Survival Ascended. Personally, this sounds like something I would rarely use, if at all, when it comes to how to play a game - it’s not something that interests me. But one use case they present is maximising performance of a game on your machine, which is cool, were it not for the fact that once again higlights how little privacy you have on a PC nowadays…
  

• Call of Duty: Warzone’s ‘Caldera’ Map Data Released to Researchers [GitHub]:
  In a really cool move to support academic researchers in environmental geometry generation, a team of developers from across Activision have released a dataset of the original - and now retired - ‘Caldera’ map from Call of Duty: Warzone.
  
  This is one of the largest datasets of its kind made available by a games studio of this magnitude. It’s wild! I love it. I can’t wait to see what research emerges courtesy of this data.