This week xAI launched Grok 4, their latest Large Language Model (LLM) that is now established as the most sophisticated, most capable model available.
While artificial intelligence is moving at an insane rate, xAI’s Grok 4 may have launched this week, it’s really just the start of the journey.
During the Grok 4 Demo Livestream, Elon Musk gave us an insight into what’s coming in the next few months – Games.
While it’s possible today to build a game in minutes, or a decent one in hours of a few days, sophisticated, entertaining and importantly, valuable games people would actually pay for, is something else.
Elon Musk explained that in the future, xAI will provide the Grok with sophisticated tooling, specifically gaming development engines like Unity or Unreal Engine and allow it to leverage those tools to create.
If the langage model understands the history of gaming and what games have been successful in the past, it has a great chance at creating a new, unique game from scratch that people will want to play.
The development path will look very different and completely disrupts historical game development. Instead of hiring a team of specialists with skills in 3D modelling, Animation, Character Rigging, audio voice acting, gameplay mechanics, lighting, texturing, directing, this will all be done by the AI.
When you’re learning these skills, you often leverage resources online, the AI of course will have already consumed this in its entirety and know how to operate it, it just needs access to execute the code in order to create each aspect of this.
Here’s where things get really interesting. Once the initial game is created, you’d typically have a team of testers that would find bugs and feedback data for improvement to the developers. Grok 4 will do this function as well. Having created the game, it would then be able to play the game and compare against the original objectives, iterating to improve until it makes a good game, a great game, and potentially, in time, the best game ever.
It’s important to remember, we’re not talking about about creating a simple clone of an existing game, we’re talking AI creating completely new IP that could produce a new source of revenue for xAI.
Naturally there’s decisions to be made about how focused the AI will be. Do you want all the resources allocated to making a single game, or spawn 100 games, have the AI play them, rank them best to worst and ship the best one?
The prospect of an AI that can ‘think’ like a game designer is a game-changer and honestly one of the most exciting prospects for real-world applications. There is very similar tooling used for TV show and movie production which makes it a likely target for AI generation in the near term.
“I think we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year. The total amount of sentient compute will exceed all humans in five years.”
Elon Musk, CEO, xAI
It is unclear if xAI would enable game development studios outside the company to leverage the same tooling. This would create competitors, so the question is, could xAI derive more income from monthly subscriptions from game studios across the world, rather than building games themselves.
The implications for the Australian game development scene are massive. Access to such a powerful creative tool could empower small indie studios to create ambitious projects that would normally require a huge team and budget. It could level the playing field and foster a new wave of innovation in interactive entertainment.
The alternative could also be true, which would see it incredibly difficult to compete with the barrier to entry being an LLM trained on a cluster of 200,000 GPUs costing tens of billions of dollars.
For more information, head to https://x.ai
