Virtual Beings and Edward Saatchi

Artificial Intelligence, Action-oriented Characters, and Simulated Worlds

My conversation with Edward Saatchi (CEO, Fable Simulation) is about his vision for virtual beings: digital characters that not only have conversations, but act within virtual worlds: living, playing, creating and forming communities. We covered the birth of all the new art forms and media resulting from generative AI, agent AIs, conversational vs. action-oriented characters, the integration of virtual beings into live games and immersive experiences, and inspiration from science-fiction such as the Culture series and the Holodeck from Star Trek.

If you prefer a podcast version to the YouTube, here’s a link for that:

Building the Metaverse, Season 2 Episode 3 on Spotify

Show Notes

• Edward’s company is Fable and he’s also the creator of Culture DAO.

• Jon’s company is Beamable.

• The Culture Series is a book by Ian Banks that inspired Edward (and Jon!) [Jon recommends starting from the second book in the series, The Player of Games]

• We talked about the Holodeck from Star Trek, which was a big part of the article: The Direct From Imagination Era Has Begun.

• You can also learn more about generative agents and whether an AI could actually be creative in Artificial Intelligence and the Search for Creativity.

• VPT (Video Pre-Training) is a technique used to train AI models from observing videos. OpenAI conducted research that used VPT to train an AI to play Minecraft based on YouTube videos.

Videos Referenced

More information about Lucy:

(See also: Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman)

BioShock Infinite - Elizabeth:

Code Miko and Lucy play Minecraft together:

Geppetto's Workshop - Twitter Video

https://twitter.com/theculturedao/status/1639298695463305216