The GTA CEO is so based

I'm speaking. I'm a speaking guy. Blinky blinky blinky blinky. Okay, sorry. I I don't know what's happening. So, what is your overall viewpoint on AI, though? Again, that's that's sort of like saying how do you feel about motherhood and apple pie? I like both. All things technology that can create efficiency, I'm I'm all in on Oh my gosh, another one of these CEO kind of brain-dead takes about AI. Here we go. Okay, what do you got to say there, big guy? You know, our stock goes down by 50 points because people are like, "Anyone can make a video game." That was the thesis. Any with AI, anyone can make a video game. It's like, "Anyone can make a video game last week. Like anyone can make a video game 5 years ago." The technology is readily available. It's commoditized. You know how many mobile games get put out a year? Thousands. You know how many hits are made in a year? Zero to five. You know who makes them? Thank you very much, we do. Absolute cinema. Is this a Is this a CEO with a based AI opinion? So, this is the interview with the CEO of Take-Two. If you don't know Take-Two, they're the ones that run Zynga, Rockstar, and 2K. So, they make all the sports ball games. They make GTA, Civilization, Borderlands, BioShock, Red Dead Redemption. And they also make whatever Zynga does, Farmville or something like that. I I don't I have no idea what that company does. But nonetheless, this is the CEO of those companies, and he actually has an interview that's about 3 minutes long that is just absolutely based, normal, somehow not completely filled with psychosis view of AI. Of course, he still makes a 12-minute video about it. Ha, prime. And I just have to yap about it because there's so many dang good points in this. But first, we have to talk about today's sponsor. You're killing me, Merge Cop. That little stunt of yours turned into a The postmortem. HE'S MERGING THE PROD. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT. COME ON, COMMISH. 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It's our chance to get the diffler. Get in. Compatibility tests, I just want to throw more kinds of tests. Shut up, Twitch. It's time to get the diffler. Sanity tests, snapshot tests, smell tests. I've been telling him I need new pills. [screaming] The Commish that we had to pull over in the car. to get force [music] my fist in the difference face. We have to stick to the process. What do you think you're doing? Uh building in public? Wrong answer, diff. I know my rights. This is just a side project. What is Merge Cop even doing? I'm working on my side project. I don't even need him. I'm using Code Rabbit. With something like Code Rabbit, it's like having a co-founder always watching my back. I'm not going to leak customer information. I'm always going to be up-to-date on coding best practices. You don't believe me? You can try it, too, [music] at coderabbit.ai. Next week on Merge Cop. Come on, you diff. Oh, I know you're the diff. So, the man that's inside this video is Strask. Oh, wait, what? 1957. Bro, he's 69. Nice. But, look at that hairline. I mean, BRO, I AM ALREADY losing the battle out here, okay? I The war is being waged, and I am losing on the front lines, and this guy is 69. Nice. Bro, okay, this is screw the AI tips. You got to give me some of these like these looks maxing, okay? Looking good for 69, I got to say. All right, so let's actually take a look at a couple of things he said that I I just thought were really well worded. Remember what AI is, despite the fact that there are people in Silicon Valley who don't want you to believe this, is big data sets, lots of compute, and a large language model mushed together. That's what they are. So, data sets by their very nature are backward looking. Creativity by its very nature is forward looking. Like I I really do like what he has to say about data just purely being a backwards-looking idea, whereas when you're coming up with something super creative, it has to be can't just simply be based on everything you've ever seen before. You have to add something a little bit, you know, special to it. And I'm thinking right now of Jonathan Blow's new game Order of the Sinking Star. Like this looks very fun. A thousand handcrafted puzzles. And yet, this doesn't stop really dumb tweets. This is that mentality that I absolutely hate, right? There's always somebody that's out there that's just been like, "Dude, I could vibe code this so easy peasy. Not a problem." It's just like, "No, you can't." Just like the Take-Two CEO said, "Making video games, that's already been available." What do you mean? You can now only make them. No, 5 years ago was commoditized. Making video games in the '90s was genuinely super duper hard. Making video games today can arguably be said to be significantly easier, especially as an indie dev, comparatively to what they used to have to go through. Like you have Godot, you have Unity, you have Unreal 5 engine super max lighting that looks just absolutely radical. I could never figure out those math equations to make lighting look like anything. And yet, that's just completely available to everybody. So, when you see these things and you see people being like, "Oh, it's so easy." Yeah, dude, well, you could just vibe code. You could just vibe code. This is just like, "No, you couldn't. You don't have the ability or the creativity to actually create these things that are novel and fun and unique." And this is also something I can kind of generally respect about Grand Theft Auto is that yeah, they could have rushed it and released it, you know, earlier this year. I mean, GTA, we've been all waiting for GTA 6 for how long now? But the fact is is that they're not releasing it right away because they want to get the game right. They actually want it to perform well. I know, it's like a crazy triple-A strategy. Make a video game and make a piece of software that works. I know, unheard This is unheard of, right? Wow, with AI, we can more efficiently create a completely derivative property. Like derivative properties don't work. So, that's where the thread has been lost that AI so far is really great at asset creation, but hit creation is not asset creation. Asset creation is a necessary but insufficient condition for hit creation. I absolutely love this because this just goes to show that creating something unique and novel is still just so difficult. And and he's actually getting to a point that's really interesting, which is okay, sure, asset creation goes to zero. Let's just pretend it goes to zero, which we all know it actually does not go to zero. Uh but it's not like asset creation wasn't the thing that makes something good. That's just a part of making something good. To make a hit, you need asset creation, but you can't make asset creation to make a hit. And it's just it's so interesting, which also leads to a second even more interesting point, which is that now that this has been so democratized to the point where I can just give English to kind of produce whatever I want. Pretend. We're I'm doing a lot of heavy lifting because I know AI, I know how it doesn't scale, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Right? Very difficult to actually make a really seriously large project with it. Uh let's just pretend you can. Even if you could, you start getting into this area where so much of it is going to just feel so average and so non-hit like because it is just all the stuff before us. It's just so derivative that the cost of making things as they approach zero, what it really means is the cost of making something novel is just going to get harder and harder to do. It's going to be harder and harder to stand out. I do like the phrase that it's never been easier to make music, but it's never been harder to make a hit. And that's the exact same thing with software. It's never been easier to make software, it's never been harder to make a hit. I mean, that's just true. It's like we don't you don't need this new technology to create assets that are competitive. That already exists. It will be quicker to do it, but speed isn't the issue. If I told you David, with this technology you can create something that looks exactly like GTA and it's going to take 3 years, not 30 seconds. You'll be like, "I'll spend 3 years on it. It's worth it." But and that exists. You can in 3 years technology exists prior to AI to clone GTA. But it won't be GTA. It'll be a clone of GTA. Clones don't sell. All hits are by their very nature unexpected. [applause] See, the thing I I I like this guy. I like how he says it because the typical Silicon Valley version of this is they just say, "Oh, you need to have taste." But there's something so much more to that than just simply taste. It's not just crap out a product as fast as possible. Get the product market fit fast as possible. Absolutely try to sell to everybody. Completely go House of Cards style and just massively produce code as quickly as possible just to be able to show to somebody, "Hey, look, I can make the thing really really quickly." Instead, it's like, "Well, you can take 3 years and you can clone whatever. You can do all these things." All this stuff has already been available. Anyone who's making this excuse that somehow we weren't able to build stuff before AI, they're just deluding themselves and they're deluding you. Like, that's not the case. The hard part and it will continue to be is not just taste. It's the ability to actually build something people want and actually have to sit down and think about it and create IP that's actually compelling. I just wanted to talk about this because, you know, I've been I've been flirting for a while now with game development. You know, we've been on a couple dates, okay? I've spent a few hours doing it now. And so I just I I love the idea of, "Hey, there is still so much room and availability to sit down and think really really hard about things and how do you make a compelling new experience? How do you actually make something that is just creatively unique and maybe just maybe you can still make a hit even if all these other things go to zero, asset creation, coding, and all that." Which by the way, uh just as more of like an inspirational note, I don't think any of those things have gone to zero, right? I don't think making compelling assets, you can just simply generate everything. There's so much to having like a dedicated artist that makes this cohesion somehow so much more beautiful. Something that you just can't quite grab from an AI. And there's also something about just knowing and hand tuning all the parameters and making things really feel and programming it a certain way that just gives it this unique feel and perspective that you just can't get by a generation. There's like there's so much to making something a unique experience that's not just make it so number one. And that's what I really want to encourage you is I still think there's just so much dang value out there in actually being good at your craft. I don't want you to be diluted to the point where you think that the only thing valuable in the world is instantaneous time. Make it happen, right? Because I think that if you just fall into that trap of thinking, you're just going to be in this weird zone where all you do is spend all of your money and time playing with the stochastic machine and never actually getting that satisfaction, that that happiness, that goodness, that comes from creation when you really sit down and think about it and design something not just visually but through the whole pipeline of like this thing is well done. From soup to nuts, I am happy. Also, totally do not understand the phrase soup to nuts. I do not know what soup and nuts have to do with each other. I assume that's like first meal as if I have a multi-course meal and with a finisher dessert of nuts. I don't know. I don't understand that phrase at all, but people say it, okay? I really like this and I wish that we had more people like him in positions of leadership speaking about AI instead of the constant Dario effect of just, "Hey, by the way, sorry everybody. Your job list in 6 months." Yeah, you. Yeah, you. Yeah, yeah, you're you're done. I mean, sure, we're going to have a company that everybody's going to use. All these companies that are paying millions of dollars a year selling to people without jobs? Okay. Weird future, dude. I don't know don't know how that one's going to work out. By the way, I would love to have this guy on the stand-up. So, if anybody happens to know him, if anybody can send him some messages, I've tried tweeting. Hey, if you can get a hold of him, tell him the world's most watched stand-up awaits his presence. The name is the prime agent.