'A massive, massive moment of wow.' Microsoft CEO predicts AI-generated games are a 'CGI moment' for the industry
Microsoft's new AI-powered game generation platform Muse is akin to the impact that CGI had on the film industry. So, says CEO Satya Nadella in a wide ranging interview covering everything from AI and quantum computing, to the future of economic growth, while slightly ignoring the fact that Microsoft's AI-generated games are only running at a resolution of 300 by 180 pixels. Hold that thought.
Aside from such trivialities as quantum computing and economic growth, what does one of the world's most powerful CEOs think about the impact of AI on PC gaming? «That to me is a massive, massive moment of wow. It's like the first time we saw ChatGPT complete sentences,» says Nadella of Muse in the interview.
What's Muse? Why it's the the first World and Human Action Model (WHAM), a generative AI model of a video game that can generate game visuals, controller actions, or both.
You can read Microsoft's own explanation of what Muse is here. But it seems to boil down to that borderline dystopian notion of sauntering up to your keyboard, spooling up your AI buddy and asking, «hey, I wanna play a first-person shooter with aliens set in ancient Rome, me as India Jones, and a comedy narrative inspired by Monty Python,» hitting enter and having it actually happen there and then.
Actually, the main impediment to a scenario like that at this stage might well be IP and copyright, though when has that ever gotten in the way of AI progress… but I digress. Although Muse is just a research platform for now, Nadella thinks its impact on real-world gaming is just around the corner.
«What I'm excited about is bringing a catalogue of games soon that we are going to train these models to generate and then start playing them,» he says, adding, «it's kinda like the CGI moment even for gaming long term.»
He also emphasised just how special a status gaming has at Microsoft. «We didn't invest in gaming to build models. Here's the interesting thing, we built our first game before we built Windows
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