Medal matches game skills to paid AI-training work

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 36:18

   Shifting gears, a lot of your fellow gamers seem to hate AI. Or I think the gaming industry in particular is very wary of AI to the extent you're seeing what the Microsoft CEO, you know, she works for Microsoft as AI pill to companies you can get sort of saying, okay, we're going to be very cautious about how much Xbox uses AI. What is your read of like why gamers have this sort of like negative reaction to what's going on in AI?

2. 36:48

   I think the reaction is actually somewhat correct and warranted. But AI hasn't really done anything for gamers other than in their professional life, right? If you think about it. And then also a lot of companies are using AI to replace things like artists with pixel-based predictions. And so we don't do pixel predictions. We do action predictions. So we try to sort of merge with the game industry in a positive way versus trying to replace art workflows and things like that, which is why we're having a lot of success.

3. 37:16

   But because AI has only historically done not so great things for gamers, right? it ruins games with bots it does and so i think that the the relationships with the games industry is you just have to prove right that like for instance uh one of the things that we're looking at doing is uh better anti-cheat which i described if you can solve all of botting in gaming using better ais gamers will like ai right but but but the games the ai companies have just chronically under-invested in gamers and so then are you surprised that they're upset no i think is actually justified uh the other end of the spectrum also which is that the games industry is in a pretty tough spot at the moment in terms of like lots of studio shutdowns so i think there's just a lot of fear and i think um one of the reasons why i was always so open about how we

4. 38:03

   went about this like i started publicly sharing sort of the the approaches that we used back in 2025 and it's because the games industry has a real shot to sort of lift up and be this frontier player in ai but it's not going to be one company it has to be every company that kind of does it, which now I think you're very positively starting to see some of these turnarounds that are led by some of the studios actually investing more in those type of capabilities.

5. 38:29

   And so I think that this year, we'll see some of it turn. And I think a lot of that is just because we need to prove that, you know, it's basically what people have seen so far is, yeah, AI creates spam, it hurts artists, it like sucks out all the humanity that we want. But if you're able to sort of imbue intelligence into non-player characters and create new paths for creatives to do interesting things, you think that will sort of give people more optimism? Yeah. And one of the reasons why I decided to start the lab and not join with another company is a lot of my friends couldn't find jobs. And I found that a lot of the lab CEOs were of the generation that they would be pretty disconnected from those types of problems where you're literally in group chats, helping your friends find jobs and they can't get

6. 39:18

   interviews because I think the entire pipelines are flooded with AI and you know these people are really good like you know that these are the friends that like should be running things right and so I think for me it's a chance to do things differently I think a lot of this a lot of people are scared a lot of people are scared that it's going to impact jobs for example one of the things that we do is we invest as much time into platforms for job creation that we put in the research so we actually work on like getting our users jobs that relate to the research that we do and so i think there's just a lot of things that you why i'm excited to build this you can do differently from uh kind of the standard sort of silicon valley approach uh Are you getting people jobs, sir?

7. 40:01

   We launched a platform. So, okay, so what's the problem in finding jobs right now is that there's so much resume flooding with LLM, so it's actually very hard for companies to get through and find qualified candidates. Well, we know exactly which action sequences people tend to be really, really good at. And so, for example, so we started actually targeting based on, like, hey, we know you're really, really good at this.

8. 40:26

   Do you want to help this with this? So like a Factorio player, we might use them for labeling like very factory specific data, right? And so we launched it. It's called Nerve. We launched it with general intuition being the first customer. But our plan is actually just to open it up to other labs. And so it's essentially like our own little McCore. So I think that the way to think about it is because as a lab, you see the future a little bit before everyone else.

9. 40:56

   And so, I mean, it's sort of like the last job is training AI to fully replace us. I mean, I appreciate this sentiment, but it is sort of the task you're having them do is train AI. Yeah, so yes and no. A lot of the times, for instance, it's, you know, there will just be, you're doing controls, right? So you're looking at, is the AI making bad moves? I think the human job just moves up the stack. I also – so I actually went through this dilemma myself and I just was like, okay, is this a bad thing or a good thing?

10. 41:27

    But at the end of the day, I believe more people with jobs has to be a good thing. So I – and there will be a new economy. We find the next job. It's like, well, this is a job today that we need people to do. Yeah, it's better. If we end up giving a few thousand people jobs, then that's better than those jobs not having been created on a net basis. And so I think the correct answer is that nobody has the answers, but we have some of the insights that we can transfer into the systems that we like the jobs that then are going to power those new types of economies.

11. 41:57

    Right. And so I think my so my answer is that you as long as we as a lab put equal effort into both, that is a sort of thing that you can do differently. And, you know, I think for us also, the metal user base, right, the platform, they are the young people. They are the ones that are going to be the most affected by this type of technology. So specifically for those, I think it's really, really important that you find a way to just connect.