cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/games@lemmy.world/p/1004331/ai-driving-game-players-are-burning-through-so-many-tokens-its-developer-had-to-take-out-a
The developer behind Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, a driving instruction sim where you instruct a generative-AI-powered, dynamic NPC, has been spending $1,000 dollars a day to keep the demo working.
Teach My Little Sister How to Drive relies on Google Gemini and ChatGPT to power its dynamic NPC, which follows your instructions, reacts, and disobeys, but the developers are looking into ways of allowing local AI models to step in for players “with sufficiently capable PCs.”
They’re using two cloud-based models for a task that is usually handled by if-then-else statements? I think I know who programmed this NPC…
Another NPC.
Why use an if statement that compiles down to a conditional branch instruction and takes a nanosecond or two to execute, when you can outsource the decision making to a paid cloud service with expensive hardware that multiplies matrices with billions of elements to get your answer?
This past week at work we had a server that kept getting overloaded because the customer started heavily using a feature that directly runs multiple files from the command line for each interaction. The feature was built long before I was there, and not thought out very well. Each files loads the same dependencies every time it’s run which takes ~5 seconds under heavily load x 50 scripts trying to run at the same time.
I pointed this out for the 3rd time that day while my coworker who has seniority was trying to figure out thy the server was stalling and kept just deploying updates that chatgpt suggested. Suggested to turn those scripts into reusable modules so we load the dependencies once and fork them to run in the background, but the coworkers robot said forking would actually be more resource intensive than running the scripts, which isn’t true if you think about it for half a second.
In the end, he said “Astra says we should upgrade the instance to <some aws one with crazy resources> and avoid updated the legacy script since they’re working as is”. My boss finally chimed in when he realized the coworker upgraded the instance from one that cost ~$200/m to one that would have cost ~$2,000 with like 60 cores and a gpu for some reason. His excuse was the robot suggested it and he stood by that decision.
Thanks for listening to me rant.
YandereDev has apparently moved on to new projects
That man should be kept far away from anything involving little sisters.
The game is also popular in Asia, where there isn’t such a stigma around generative AI, which people in the West tend to hate because it’s a theft engine that sucks up the planet’s energy like Shinra.
Fuck that’s a good analogy
I’m gonna start referring to all of the AI companies as Shinra
Thanks… Now i have to know all about Shinra. Imma get my shovel and head torch
It’s from Final Fantasy. They exploit the planet’s lifestream for power and convert that power into tyrannical control.
When will people learn that cloud (aka someone else’s computer you rent) is not a good deal for this sort of task? A person smart enough to write a game should really have the fore-thought to estimate the costs up-front of using an external service as part of it.
On the other hand, I’m happy if people token-max the FREE tiers of “AI”, to drive these a-hole companies out of business faster. It’s just unsustainable and the big cloud companies are burning money way faster than they can realistically charge for it, so the more free ‘burners’ going, the better, in a twisted way. Bankrupt those MFers, no mercy.
A person smart enough to write a game
It’s really not hard to write a game these days. (Good or high end games are a different story). These pictures look 100% asset flipped using a driving sim tutorial project. There is zero smarts required. I’d be surprised if they didn’t just download a demo project and plug in the LLM.
when will people learn
Never
It’s more than a bit depressing that debtmaxxing dumbarse developers does destroy our planet too… but not doing it will only prolong our pain I guess.
Sounds like a perfect microcosm of the whole stupid thing. It’s basically the “SliceLine” business model, from Silicon Valley. (Where they were buying Dominos’ pizzas and putting them in their own boxes and reselling them for less than a Domino’s pizza.) You can’t make a profit, can’t even not lose money with every customer. But you can burn venture capital to offer your product at a loss and then use your increasing revenue to attract more investor money, while promising a new version of the service that actually will be profitable, right around the corner, real soon now- and hope to get bought out before your bullshit all falls apart.
That sounds remarkably close to what AI companies are doing already, now you mention it.
I did not realize that this game was backing the little sister character with a live cloud-based LLM. I just assumed it was something that would be a pre-trained local thing, or just have a finite set of responses.
That seems horrifically unsustainable.
In theory it’s less complicated to handle a local AI with local resources. Remote AI would have been far more complex before the current state of AI. This method is just lazey API plugins that probably are asking the same prompts repeatedly. It looks to me to be a game trying to wedge LLMs into the industry. Has there been any effort to reduse the token burn or is it too fundamental to the game?
from the article it sounds like the devs are looking into ways of integrating local AI, but for now its just prompting ChatGPT and Gemini for responses for the little sister character. Basically, the gameplay is you tell the NPC what to do with your microphone, she seems to pause for a sec, then reacts by saying something and maybe carrying out whatever it is you told her to do.
Like you could say “Turn the wheel 50% left and accelerate to 20 km/h” and she would respond. From the gameplay i’ve seen, it seems pretty hit or miss if she reacts correctly. Like I watched a few 2ish hour streams of it and it pretty much took that long to get through the 3 or 4 levels in the demo, and most of that was the NPC not really responding in a consistent way. Basically, the AI reliance seems entirely central to the gameplay loop at this point.
That seems horrifically unsustainable.
It’s not a bubble, you’re a bubble!
Then the bank was foolish to approve the loan.
Money lenders are great at Pavlov-reacting when you mumble “with ai, so gud, so dengerlus”
Well, they’re an idiot then. Smh
Well now I want to play this just so I can burn up more of this guys money and then never buy the thing since it seems extremely limited.
NPCs in games may be one of the very few actual good uses for AI. But not using the cloud obviously.
The graphics processor is busy doing graphics processing while playing a game. All supporting features of game development: logic, physics, npcs, only run on cpus.
NPCs in games may be one of the very few actual good uses for AI
No. No, they’re not.
Hey, you. You’re finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.
Yes, exactly. You know, I really wanted to cross that border to reach my family. My mother is very sick and needs my help. I brought some things along to help her, too… Some Trama Root and a Thistle Branch. The only thing left I need for her is a python script that reads a six column csv file that contains the start and end dates of our business quarters, the locations, the spending and income of those branches and their name and builds a nice graph to visualise the development each of those branches went through over the last ten years.
I thought we all learned this with the Batman Arkham games. “Real” AI would have made those games unplayable Souls-like nightmares as the enemies learn every single trick or something. We only got the dark knight power fantasy because of the very basic state machines they used. Like I teach them being praised at the time.
I think that it would be highly dependant on how the AI model is trained and what genre of game it is implemented into. For example, games that more heavily rely on dialogue or social interaction.
Take Danganronpa, which is a series if linear narrative games about students trapped in a school forced to kill each other (and get way with it) to escape. You as the player have to investigate each murder and arrive at who the culprit was to win the game. They are fun on your first playthrough, but on any subsequent playthrough you already know the solutions. Like playing Clue but the game only ever has one outcome: Mr. Green, in the Library, with the Lead Pipe. You wouldn’t even have to open the game box and you already know. Absolutely zero replayability.
With an AI in such a game, you could have a new gamemode, like a New Game+, which players can play after the hand-crafted story. This is where I think something like a very carefully trained LLM could be useful, because it could create these kinds of situations at random, making them unpredictable and therefore adding replay value. Now, I don’t think AI is currently sufficiently advanced for this use, but if it continues to develop I could see that niche making good use of it.
Gonna have to agree to disagree. Part of the joy of any game is the careful crafting of the people who made them. Generating lines on the fly is going to lose that. Period. Even if they’re more advanced. Unless they’re actually sentient and understand what they’re creating I guarantee it won’t be the same.
Nah
First of all, video games, including detective adventure games with randomised riddles to solve and different endings, have been done for quite some time, long before llms. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game) . You don’t need a language model for that. Just be passionate about the project.
Second, the whole idea of a video game like that is to tell a story. The last thing I would want is randomised bullshit to click through, wondering all the time if what I’m reading is even still within the boundaries of what the developers wanted or if the llm was already going off the rails. And that’s not even considering the shale feeling of consuming not some created, curated story but merely the condensed diarrhea of stolen work.
No thanks.
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Well as I said, this would be for an additional game mode for replayability, not the primary story mode.
Randomized content for a game like Danganronpa would be significantly more complex than Blade Runner. If a human/humans were programming it, each NPC (of which there are at least 18) would need their own randomizable schedule of daily activities, each would need their own dialogue lines which would easily number into the tens of thousands at least, and each would need the capability to commit a crime which is not witnessed by the player. The necessary variety of crime events would need to be very large to avoid the standard problem of procedural generation always feeling samey/generic, written by a human or not. Without large variety, it would feel like dungeons in Daggerfall.
I mean yeah, a human probably could make that, but by the time they actually finished the content, the hardware their game is designed to run on would be considered “historically significant.” It would easily take so long to develop that that it would not be worth the time investment. Unless they made serious content cuts, which would result in a pretty repetitive feeling final product. I dont see a reason that a specifically trained AI could fill in for the immense level of variety needed for that.
Not that it really matters anyway, because I don’t think anything exists that could run that performantly on a local device. Also the amount of time and data required to train something like that is probably not worth the time or cost investment either. Like I said before, I don’t think current AI is sufficiently advanced enough for implementation. It would need further development, and if it did get further developed I could see a potential for it. But not right now, as I previously stated. And honestly it would probably need so long to develop that businesses will probably either have given up on AI (hopefully) or I won’t be alive anymore to see it happen.
You’re making some crazy statements and assumptions about a lot of things here, none of which are generally true. We saw a lot of games with vast amounts of content created with big teams. Saying it’s impossible without ai in a reasonable timeframe doesn’t magically become true by claiming it. And that’s not even addressing the point that shitty randomised llm content will probably be just as shallow and repetitive as your negative examples.
A locally run model with quest components and npc dialog as its training data could be tuned in such a way to make radiant quests more unique and engaging. The scenario you’re putting forward assumes a frame around a general purpose LLM, which would be a very bad idea (as the OP article shows.)
Which existed in the 90s
God I loved those games.
I’ve seen a YouTuber or two playing this game. It looked like shit. And knowing that it needed too large language models just to play so poorly. Confirms that it’s shit.
