Another day, another tech and/or entertainment company betting on AI. It’s now Koei Tecmo’s turn, as the Japanese giant has jointly announced a partnership with SpiralAI alongside the unveiling of the “next-generation” large language model Geppetto2.
Via 4Gamer.net (and reported on by Automaton), we’ve learned about the move, which is defined by the “signing of a strategic partnership” between the two companies. This isn’t another ChatGPT situation, but it reminds us of several announcements in recent years related to conversational AI and advanced non-player characters which, so far, have led nowhere meaningful.
As pointed out by Automaton, SpiralAI is a startup founded in 2023 “with experience in developing character-based conversational AI,” which is a bold claim considering these things have only hit the mainstream in the last two years or so. LLMs, however, have been around for way longer than that, and that’s where Koei Tecmo and SpiralAI are focusing.
Geppetto2 is described as “a model specifically designed for use in entertainment, including video games” that was developed with the intent of allowing players and in-game characters to have “natural and true-to-character” conversations that strictly adhere to their “predefined fictional backgrounds” and the game’s own content with the goal of “reducing hallucinations.” Note how even the model’s comms-approved reveal can’t guarantee this (potential) product will function properly.
In the original press release, Koei Tecmo CEO Hisashi Koinuma commented the company has made the investment because it values “efforts in leveraging AI to create new forms of entertainment.” No specifics have been shared because that would be logical, but since Koei Tecmo is publicly traded, that may give a boost to its stock price even if nothing comes out of it. We’ve been here before anyway.
If you think you’ve seen this sort of thing before, you’re right. Two years ago, we saw Ubisoft unveil generative AI “NEO NPCs”, and then shortly after, Nvidia teased something similar. Whether we like it or not, this sort of tech is here to stay, but we will hold all of our judgements until we actually see what sort of meaningful impact this sort of tech can have in games.
