How AI could disrupt video-gaming

Flinging brightlygpugpuaiaiVCai coloured objects around a screen at high speed is not what computers’ central processing units were designed for. So manufacturers of arcade machines invented the graphics-processing unit (), a set of circuits to handle video games’ visuals in parallel to the work done by the central processor. The ’s ability to speed up complex tasks has since found wider uses: video editing, cryptocurrency mining and, most recently, the training of artificial intelligence. is now disrupting the industry that helped bring it into being. Every part of entertainment stands to be affected by generative , which digests inputs of text, image, audio or video to create new outputs of the same. But the games business will change the most, argues Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital () firm. Games’ interactivity requires them to be stuffed with laboriously designed content: consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in “Red Dead Redemption 2”, a recent cowboy adventure. Enlisting assistants to churn it out could drastically shrink timescales and budgets.