And because this sort of big business often focuses obsessively on what can be measured, ignoring what cannot be. Even if the later might be more important.
You can measure the number of vertices in a model, the total resolution, the expected gameplay length, the number of dev hours that went into a project. But you cannot reasonably measure the fun value of your game; at most you can rank it in comparison with other games. So fun value takes a backseat, even if it's bread and butter.
In the meantime those small devs look holistically at their games. "This shit isn't fun, I'm reworking it" here, "wow this mechanic actually works! I'll expand it further" there.
as Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is [...]
The older games are not "overperforming". The newer games are underperforming.
Large studios are "struggling to drive sales" because customers take cost and benefit into account.
The success of those solo devs and small teams is not "outsized", it's deserved because they get it right.
What's happening is that small devs release reasonably priced games with fun gameplay. In the meantime larger studios be like "needz moar grafix", and pricing their games way above people are willing to pay.
More than "deprofessionalisation", what's primarily happening is the de-large-studio-isation: the independence of professionals, migrating to their own endeavours.
Also: "deprofessionalisation" implies that people leaving large studios stop being professionals, as if small/solo devs must be necessarily amateurs. That is not the case.
Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor
And he "conveniently" omits the fact that most of that value wouldn't reach the workers on first place. It's retained by whoever owns those big gaming companies.
And people know it. That's yet another reason why they'd rather buy a game from a random nobody than some big company.
As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it [...]
Rigney offered some extra nuance on his "deprofessionalization" theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be "the first" on the chopping block, followed by "roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they're not)."
Emphasis mine. Now it's easy to get why he's so worried about this process: large studios rely on marketing to oversell their games, while small devs mostly reach you by word-of-mouth.
Something must be said about marketing. Marketing is fine and dandy when it's informing people about the existence of the goods to be bought; sadly 90% of marketing is not that, it's to convince you that orange is purple.
My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.
Unlike marketing teams, I'm genuinely worried about those people. I hope that they find their way into small dev teams.
Mewgenics is actually going to be released? I thought it was vaporware!
...I'm actually glad. I was quite interested on the game when announced back then. The video makes me feel that it's completely different from what I expected, but still fun. (I like this sort of X-COM-like game.)
Yes, it is expensive. But most of that cost is not because of simple applications, like in my example with grammar tables. It's because those models have been scaled up to a bazillion parameters and "trained" with a gorillabyte of scrapped data, in the hopes they'll magically reach sentience and stop telling you to put glue on pizza. It's because of meaning (semantics and pragmatics), not grammar.
Also, natural languages don't really have nonsensical rules; sure, sometimes you see some weird stuff (like Italian genderbending plurals, or English question formation), but even those are procedural: "if X, do Y". LLMs are actually rather good at regenerating those procedural rules based on examples from the data.
But I wish it had some broader use, that would justify its cost.
I with that they cut down the costs based on the current uses. Small models for specific applications, dirty cheap in both training and running costs.
(In both our cases, it's about matching cost vs. use.)
I'd go further: you won't reach AGI through LLM development. It's like randomly throwing bricks on a construction site, no cement, and hoping that you'll get a house.
I'm not even sure if AGI is cost-wise feasible with the current hardware, we'd probably need cheaper calculations per unit of energy.
Why not quanta? Don't you believe in the power of the crystals? Quantum vibrations of the Universe from negative ions from the Himalayan salt lamps give you 153.7% better spiritual connection with the soul of the cosmic rays of the Unity!
...what makes me sadder about the generative models is that the underlying tech is genuinely interesting. For example, for languages with large presence online they get the grammar right, so stuff like "give me a [declension | conjugation] table for [noun | verb]" works great, and if it's any application where accuracy isn't a big deal (like "give me ideas for [thing]") you'll probably get some interesting output. But it certainly not give you reliable info about most stuff, unless directly copied from elsewhere.
The whole thing can be summed up as the following: they're selling you a hammer and telling you to use it with screws. Once you hammer the screw, it trashes the wood really bad. Then they're calling the wood trashing "hallucination", and promising you better hammers that won't do this. Except a hammer is not a tool to use with screws dammit, you should be using a screwdriver.
An AI leaderboard suggests the newest reasoning models used in chatbots are producing less accurate results because of higher hallucination rates.
So he's suggesting that the models are producing less accurate results... because they have higher rates of less accurate results? This is a tautological pseudo-explanation.
AI chatbots from tech companies such as OpenAI and Google have been getting so-called reasoning upgrades over the past months
When are people going to accept the fact that large "language" models are not general intelligence?
ideally to make them better at giving us answers we can trust
Those models are useful, but only a fool trusts = is gullible towards their output.
OpenAI says the reasoning process isn’t to blame.
Just like my dog isn't to blame for the holes in my garden. Because I don't have a dog.
This is sounding more and more like model collapse - models perform worse when trained on the output of other models.
inb4 sealions asking what's my definition of reasoning in 3...2...1...
I wish EU4 had more automation, the amount of micromanagement there was awful. And this sort of game is more interesting when you can focus on the big picture.
Sadly I don't trust Hipsters' Electronic Arts Paradox to do automation right. And by "right" I mean:
Transparent. You could reasonably get why the game AI will / won't take a certain decision, without spending hours in the wiki or fucking around the game files.
Flexible. The best decision is often circumstantial, and playing styles are a thing.
Powerful, but not overpowered. The AI's decisions should be decent, but not the best - a player who takes the time to learn how stuff works should be rewarded. (Or even better, tweak the AI so it does the best.)
I feel like I've been using this metaphor a bit too often, but: Nintendo is shitting its pants to make Pocketpair (PalWorld dev) smell. So far, the results of the litigation have been slightly bad for Pocketpair, but really bad for Nintendo - just the sheer amount of negative publicity is likely costing Nintendo more money than it could ever get from this turf war.
Serious now, I wouldn't be surprised if USA's video game industry was suddenly gone - because for countries not directly caught in the tariffs war, businesses outside USA (like Sony and Nintendo) will get another competitive advantage.
If anything, printers today are worse than they used to be in the 90s. For example, I don't remember chips preventing you from using third party ink being a thing back then. So I believe the printing industry mafia has been spending those decades adding antifeatures to their designs.
And IMO it highlights how much we [society in general] need open hardware.
![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Yup - Kovarex is a great example of how the indie scene is actually professionalising people, not the opposite.