I was just about to bang out that they must lose a lot of heat from the compression. But apparently not! That’s amazing.

I’m struggling to think of systems that would significantly outperform “75%+”. Chilled superconducting coils? Those are expensive, and would fail rather catastrophically.

A prudent strategy would be a 2nd account for orders, maybe?

Yeah :(

Still though, Intel has their own fabs not really restricted by any of this. And not as easy to spin down as PCB making. So the CPU is likely to be the cheapest of anything.

You don’t need LLMs for that. An iPhone is plenty powerful enough for image recognition and text classification.

That’s sorta the funny thing about AI. There’s tons of potential, but it’s just unimplemented. Even on PC, you pretty much have to have some Nvidia GPU and fight pip setting up python repos to get anything working.

The last feature is the mildly interesting one, but in my experience just not useful enough to do much, even on specific browsing finetunes or augmented APIs.

I guess shake to summarize is mildly interesting, but not really? I simply can’t trust it. And I can just paste the (much more concise) relevant text into a chat window and get a much better answer.

Does anyone even talk about what the “AI features” are?

Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop? Create a price/feature table out of a shopping page?

See, this would all be neat like auto translate is neat.

But I’m not really interested in the 7 millionth barebones chatbot UI. I’m not interested in loading a whole freaking LLM to auto name my tabs, or in some cutsie auto navigation agent experiment that still only works like 20% of the time with a 600B LLM, or a shopping chatbot that doesn’t do anything like Amazon/Perplexity.

That’s the weird thing about all this. I’m not against neat features, but “AI!” is not a feature, and everyone is right to assume it will be some spam because that’s what 99% of everything AI is. But it’s like every CEO on Earth has caught the same virus and think a product with “AI” in the name is like a holy grail, regardless of functionality.

OP is right, though abrasive.

Engagement is engagement. The more people talk about Tate and Paul, even if it’s negative, the bigger their mansions get.

Again, they’re tools. Some of the most useful applications for LLMs I’ve worked on are never even seen by human eyes, like ranking, then ingesting documents and filling out json in pipelines. Or as automated testers.

Another is augmented diffusion. You can do crazy things with depth maps, areas, segmentation, mixed with hand sketching to “prompt” diffusion models without a single typed word. Or you can use them for touching up something hand painted, spot by spot.

You just need to put everything you’ve ever seen with ChatGPT and copilot and the NotebookLM YouTube spam out of your head. Banging text into a box and “prompt engineering” is not AI. Chat tuned decoder-only LLMs are just one tiny slice that a few Tech Bros turned into a pyramid scheme.

An OpenAI subscription does not count.

Otherwise, yeah… but it helps them less, proportionally. AAAs still have the fundamental Issue of targeting huge audiences with bland games. Making them even more gigantic isn’t going to help much.

AAs and below can get closer to that “AAA” feel with their more focused project.

Then most just won’t go on the Game Awards, and devs will go on using Cursor or whatever they feel comfortable with in their IDE setup.

I’m all against AI slop, but you’re setting an unreasonably absolute standard. It’s like saying “I will never use any game that was developed in proximity to any closed source software.” That is possible, technically, but most people aren’t gonna do that. It’s basically impossible on a larger team. Give them some slack with the requirement; it’s okay to develop on Windows or on Steam, just open the game’s source.

Similarly, let devs use basic tools. Ban slop from the end product.

Now my blood boils like everyone else’s when it comes to being forced to use AI at work, or when I hear the AI Voice on Youtube, or the forced AI updates to Windows and VS Code

You don’t hate AI. You hate Big Tech Evangelism. You hate corporate enshittification, AI oligarchs, and the death of the internet being shoved down your throat.

…I think people get way too focused on the tool, and not these awful entries wielding them while conning everyone. They’re the responsible party.

You’re using “AI” as a synonym for OpenAI, basically, but that’s not Joel Haver’s rotoscope filter at all. That’s niche machine learning.

As for the exponential cost, that’s another con. Sam Altman just wants people to give him money.

Look up what it takes to train (say) Z Image or GLM 4.6. It’s peanuts, and gets cheaper every month. And eventually everyone will realize this is all a race to the bottom, not the top… but it’s talking a little while :/

Yeah.

Maybe a technicality too. The rule said “no AI,” and E33 used AI.

I get their intent: keep AI slop games out. But in hindsight, making the restriction so absolute was probably unwise.

If we’re banning games over how they make concept art… I’m not sure how you expect to enforce that. How could you possibly audit that?

Are you putting coding tools in this bucket?

Then you’re going to get almost no games.

Or just get devs lying about using cursor or whatever when they code.

If that’s the culture of the Game Awards, if they have to lie just to get on, that… doesn’t seem healthy.

That’s just not going to happen.

Nearly any game with more than a few people involved is going have someone use cursor code completion, or use one for reference or something. They could pull in libraries with a little AI code in them, or use an Adobe filter they didn’t realize is technically GenAI, or commission an artist that uses a tiny bit in their workflow.

If the next Game Awards could somehow audit game sources and enforce that, it’d probably be a few solo dev games, and nothing elsex

Not that AI Slop should be tolerated. But I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be enforced so strictly.

Oh, yes. Big publisher will try it on a huge scale. They cant help themselves.

And they’re going to get sloppy results back. If they wanna footgun themselves, it’s their foot to shoot.

Some mid sized devs may catch this “Tech Bro Syndrome” too, unfortunately.

I think AI is too dumb, and will always be too dumb, to replace good artists.

I think most game studios can’t afford full time art house across like 30 countries, nor should they want the kind of development abomination Ubisoft has set up. That’s what I’m referring to when I say “outsourced”; development that has just gotten too big, with too many people and too generic a target market. And yes, too many artists working on one game.

I think game artists should have a more intimate relationship with their studio, like they did with E33.

And it’d be nice for them have tools to make more art than they do now, so they can make bigger, richer games, quicker, with less stress and less financial risk. And no enshittification that happens when their studio gets too big.

That’s fair.

But the Game Awards should reconsider that label next year. The connotation is clearly “AI Slop,” and that just doesn’t fit for stuff like cursor code completion, or the few textures E33 used.

Otherwise studios are just going to lie. If they don’t, GA will be completely devoid of bigger projects.

…I don’t know what the threshold for an “AI Slop” game should be through. It’s clearly not E33. But you don’t want a sloppy, heavily marketed game worming its way in, either.

I understand the principle. Even if E33 is not slop, people should fear a road that leads to dependence on “surveillance state AI” like OpenAI. That’s unacceptable.

That being said, I think a lot of people don’t realize how commoditized it’s getting. “AI” is not a monoculture, it’s not transcending to replace people, and it’s not limited to corporate APIs. This stuff is racing to the bottom to become a set of dumb tools, and dirt cheap. TBH that’s something that makes a lot of sense for a game studio lead to want.

And E33 is clearly not part of the “Tech Bro Evangalism” camp. They made a few textures, with a tool.

More that an existing smaller studio doesn’t have to sell their soul to a publisher (or get lucky) to survive. They can more safely make a “big” game without going AAA.

My observation is that there’s a “sweet spot” for developers somewhere around the Satisfactory (Coffee Stain) size, with E33 at the upper end of that, but that limits their audience and scope. If they can cut expensive mocap rigs, a bunch of outsourced bulk art, stuff like that with specific automation, so long as they don’t tether themselves to Big Tech AI, that takes away the advantage AAAs have over them.

A few computer generated textures is the first tiny step in that direction.

So no. AI is shit at replacing artists. Especially in E33 tier games. But it’s not a bad tool to add to their bucket, so they can do more.