Episode Details

We are 200 people over our 300-person venue capacity for AI UX 2024, but you can subscribe to our YouTube for the video recaps.

Our next event, and largest EVER, is the AI Engineer World’s Fair. See you there!

Parental advisory: Adult language used in the first 10 mins of this podcast.

Any accounting of Generative AI that ends with RAG as its “final form” is seriously lacking in imagination and missing out on its full potential. While AI generation is very good for “spicy autocomplete” and “reasoning and retrieval with in context learning”, there’s a lot of untapped potential for simulative AI in exploring the latent space of multiverses adjacent to ours.

GANs

Many research scientists credit the 2017 Transformer for the modern foundation model revolution, but for many artists the origin of “generative AI” traces a little further back to the Generative Adversarial Networks proposed by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, spawning an army of variants and Cats and People that do not exist:

We can directly visualize the quality improvement in the decade since:

GPT-2

Of course, more recently, text generative AI started being too dangerous to release in 2019 and claiming headlines. AI Dungeon was the first to put GPT2 to a purely creative use, replacing human dungeon masters and DnD/MUD games of yore.

More recent gamelike work like the Generative Agents (aka Smallville) paper keep exploring the potential of simulative AI for game experiences.

ChatGPT

Not long after ChatGPT broke the Internet, one of the most fascinating generative AI finds was Jonas Degrave (of Deepmind!)’s Building A Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT:

The open-ended interactivity of ChatGPT and all its successors enabled an “open world” type simulation where “hallucination” is a feature and a gift to dance with, rather than a nasty bug to be stamped out. However, further updates to ChatGPT seemed to “nerf” the model’s ability to perform creative simulations, particularly with the deprecation of the `completion` mode of APIs in favor of `chatCompletion`.

WorldSim (https://worldsim.nousresearch.com/)

It is with this context we explain WorldSim and WebSim. We recommend you watch the WorldSim demo video on our YouTube for the best context, but basically if you are a developer it is a Claude prompt that is a portal into another world of your own choosing, that you can navigate with bash commands that you make up.

The live video demo was highly enjoyable:

Why Claude? Hints from Amanda Askell on the Claude 3 system prompt gave some inspiration, and