Roadmap

Wow the last week has been a whirlwind. I’ve been blown away at the amount of attention AI Dungeon 2 and it’s made me want to drop everything to continually improve it. (Though I should probably pass my final week of classes so I can actually graduate) 

This is really a new evolution in entertainment and it’s going to go some awesome places. Here’s my roadmap of the near to longer term goals I want to work on.

Priority 1: Get app version out

My first big priority is getting the mobile/web app working so that we’re not reliant on colab servers. I think it’s only a matter of time until Colab stops allowing AI Dungeon to be played on their servers. My current estimate is it’s costing them something between $50k to $100k per month just from AI Dungeon. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if we are already half their cost. 

Colab is also a poor place to play for many reasons including it has a bad UI, crashes frequently, is confusing to non technical people, isn’t accessible to the blind, requires access to run code connected to google account, is wasteful in running one GPU per player and downloading the model each time and more.

The alpha version of the app is working and we have the infrastructure to run the model on the cloud.  We need another day or two of testing before we start beta, but we hope to start by the end of the week. 

We’re going to be doing everything we can to keep the game free for users if possible. We might initially only be able to give a certain amount of free time to users per month, but we hope to make it available to all. 

Please keep in mind though that this game is going to be EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE to run. This is literally the most GPU intensive game you’ve ever played. So please be understanding that we will need to find a way to support those massive server costs while also being able to continue to improve the game.

Priority 2: Low hanging fruit in game improvements:

There’s a lot of ways the game could potentially be improved on the model and ML side, but I think there is still a lot of low hanging fruit we can reach with simpler improvements. Some of the biggest things I’d like to add is more protection against repetition. As many of you have probably experienced repetition is the Kryptonite to the model. So doing some controls on that could help a lot. 

Priority 3: Next phase:

After getting the game more polished we want to help improve the community around AI Dungeon. We’ve already seen an awesome group of AI Dungeon hackers adding improvements to the game. We really want to support them. Currently we are thinking about how we can add a high level of mod support to the game to allow people to make interesting new applications in it. The hardest part about this kind of game is going to be the architecture to serve the model.

Our hope is that we can provide that infrastructure so the awesome creators in the community can use it to make new and interesting ways to play in an infinite unbounded world. We also hope to add some better ways to read, share and vote for the best stories generated by AI Dungeon. 

Priority 4: R&D:

One of the things I’m most excited about is where this idea can go in the long term. This is a completely new idea in gaming and entertainment. No longer will we be constrained in what we do by what developers imagined and scripted. We can do anything. But there’s still a long way to go in improving the model to get to the full potential. Once we’ve gotten the game more stable we’re going to look into the nitty gritty of how we can improve the game. How can we add more structured state to the game? How can we constrain it to force SFW generation? How can we make a game that has long term story cohesion and persistent world? 

These aren’t solved questions and will take hard work. Hopefully if we’re able to grow the team we can work on this research both as an AI Dungeon team and by having collaboration with research organizations.

Conclusion:

There’s a long road ahead of us. But I’m in it for the long haul and I’m super excited about where this new evolution in gaming and entertainment will take us. Thank you for your support and encouragement. It means a ton. :) 

Please let me know what your thoughts and suggestions are.