Virtual Beings Summit Showcases How AI Simulations Will Change Entertainment (June 7 in SF)

fifth annual Virtual Human Summit: Simulation Taking place in San Francisco on June 7, the event will revolve around the megatrend of AI simulations, where intelligent AI characters take their place in virtual worlds.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Fable Studio CEO Edward Saatchi stated that even though these characters are not controlled by humans, they can live their lives in these virtual worlds and continue to thrive.As curator, Saatchi is front and center of this trend Virtual Human Summit.

“This year’s theme is that single-agent chatbots have peaked,” Saatchi said. “They’ve been commoditized, and there’s hundreds of them. It’s ultimately boring. Talk to these AIs, and when you talk to them, they just pop up. They don’t really have a life. So they can’t empathize with you. They can’t tell You see what’s going on in their lives and their day because they don’t exist. So I brought together some of the people who I think are the most interesting around simulation to talk about it.”

When it comes to chatbots, Saatchi argues that virtual beings created to talk to us should have real lives.

“It’s different than just a backstory where you write their world like a page and then they’re like that,” Saatchi said. “They actually need to exist in a virtual life, in space and time, they need to exist in a social environment like a family. They need to be respected to really have autonomy in these worlds. Now there is technology. “

simulation

Saatchi’s leaders at Fable Studio – Jessica Shamash, Frank Carey, and Pete Billington – spoke at our recent GamesBeat Summit 2023 event about simulationa new game they’re working on where players train AI characters and then place them in a virtual world.

Saatchi said the simulation will become the virtual world of AI, which is surpassing the world of AI chatbots, such as Fable’s early AI characters, lucy. In their continuous exploration, they found that virtual people need more than intelligence and personality; they need a living world where they can live their own lives, create memories and evolve. Then they’ll look more like real people — or characters we can relate to and interact with. If you leave them in there long enough, they may become sapient. That’s just part of the new AI movement that Virtual Beings Summit aims to capture.

In our interview, Saatchi said that the theme of the latest summit is Virtual Beings 2.0 — 24/7 simulation of virtual beings.

“So far, Virtual Beings has focused on recreating what we saw in the movies. she – a one-to-one relationship between a human and a machine,” Saatchi said. “The goal of the Virtual Human Summit is to shift the conversation to ‘simulated virtual humans,’ or AI living 24/7 in a 3D simulation, with family, Colleagues, neighbors, and friends stay together—no personal connections and urgent intelligence needed.

A recent Stanford paper on simulations by Joon Park (who spoke at the summit) suggests that simulations could be the next big idea. Saatchi went on to say that single-agent (1:1) AI chatbots are now so commonplace that they can be commoditized.

“Silicon Valley is looking for the next big idea — and simulated virtual humans might be just that,” Saatchi said.

At the Virtual Beings Summit: Simulations, the summit will announce the inaugural Virtual Beings Awards. Nominations will open on Wednesday and winners will be announced on October 4, 2023.

“2023 is the biggest year ever for AI virtual humans, and we’re excited to shine the spotlight on the most impressive and interesting players in the field,” Saatchi said.

There are six key categories: Best Avatar (Overall); Best Avatar; Best Avatar Intelligence (Jury Awards); Best Avatar Simulation; Best Virtual Writer; Best Virtual Presence.

Lecture

The Sims creator Will Wright will talk about the move from The Sims to simulations and their importance in the future.

Genvid Chief Creative Officer Stephan Bugaj will talk about the upcoming Silent Hill: Ascension new category of social simulation games called Massively Interactive Live Events (MILE).

Scott Lighthiser, Creative Director of AI-powered film studio Pillars Films, will talk about “Hollywood
and Simulation: Creating Nightmares in a Simulation Lab” about how monsters in future blockbusters will evolve in simulation—with unique body types, walking styles, and autonomous behaviors in horror movies.

Saatchi sees gamers as a pathway to artificial general intelligence, or AI characters as smart as humans. He will explore how gaming can be a bottom-up alternative path to emerging intelligence/AGI, rather than the expensive top-down investments of OpenAI, Deepmind, and Anthropic. For example, he believes AI will be able to create its own video comedy series.

“Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been a great boon for AI training — but what if we could gamify RLHF in Sims-like simulations?” Saatchi said. “Crowdsourced gamers, training AI via RLHF may reach human-level intelligence (the dreaded ‘AGI’) cheaper and faster than OpenAI and Deepmind. The consensus view that AGI will come from more powerful computation and more data defies common sense – the creation of a second intelligent species will not
Moore’s Law – it’s going to take a less linear and predictable path, and gamers competing to make AI smarter may be AGI’s secret sauce. “