AI Takes Over Game Dev
This week was a good one for AI-powered game development.
Google Labs announced Playground, a game development platform that claims to let you build any game you can imagine through a prompt. It’s currently available in the US for users 18 and older, with no access from Turkey. Games built on Playground are accessible through the Playground gallery. (We tried visiting their site via the link on the Playground X profile on mobile and geoblocking didn’t kick in, so we managed to test it. heheh.)
Running in parallel with Playground, Unity Spark was announced. Unity Spark lets you create games using custom-designed ready-made assets and prompts. Users can also publish games they build with Unity Spark directly to Playground. You can join the waitlist now: unity.com/spark
Xbox also announced Xbox Labs, which lets Xbox games be played on the web. Xbox Labs uses WebAssembly and WebGPU to make Windows PC games playable in the browser. On top of that, they’re using AI to make game packages rewritable and editable, enabling experiments that mash up different games. There’s already an experiment running on the platform where Minecraft’s Steve fights a boss from Elden Ring’s world.
Google Playground → | Xbox Labs →
OpenAI’s Turbulent Week
This week, OpenAI launched GPT-6 and Intelligent UI in ChatGPT. Intelligent UI stands out by creating the most appropriate interface element for each question, making complex topics easier to communicate. They also shook the math community again by announcing they had solved new math problems with an unreleased frontier model. The repo they created on GitHub racked up 11K stars and 19 million views.
We were going to leave it at that, but the company kept grabbing headlines with more drama. First, we learned through an open letter shared by employees on X that three safety researchers had been fired. The official reason: one of them had accessed a manager’s emails without permission. The letter claimed the real reason was that they “put short-term AI safety concerns ahead of corporate interests.”
On top of all that, it came out that an employee had planted a listening device in a meeting room at one of OpenAI’s offices, was caught, and was arrested by the FBI.
Safety team open letter → | FBI arrest (DOJ) →
⚡️ Quick Bits
The news cycle was so packed this week that the quick hits aren’t so quick.
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