Gabe Newell praises emergence of AI as a revolutionary technology

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LakeOf9

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"Well I think [in terms of] significant technology transitions there was pre-computer and there was post-computer, there was pre-internet and then there was post-internet," says Newell. "I think it's incredibly obvious that machine learning systems, AI systems, are going to profoundly impact pretty much every single business.

"So if I had to point to a technology transition to get in front of, it's to figure out how to use AI to do anything better. If you wanna be an accountant, learn AI, if you want to be an attorney, learn AI, if you're gonna be a programmer, you know, make sure that you know how to use the tools that are comfortable with those programming concepts. That all seems super obvious."

"Similarly on the internet there were the companies and individuals who saw the opportunity and took advantage of those opportunities to create more value either as an individual or as a corporation and they zoomed ahead of everybody else. So essentially AI is going to be a cheat code for people who want to take advantage of it."

www.pcgamer.com

Gabe Newell says AI is a 'significant technology transition' on a par with the emergence of computers or the internet, and will be 'a cheat code for people who want to take advantage of it'

"If I had to point to a technology transition to get in front of, it's to figure out how to use AI to do anything better."
www.pcgamer.com www.pcgamer.com

GabeN noooo
 
renews cbs GIF
 
I may not like it, but he's not wrong. As someone who works on software development AI sure has sped up a lot of stuff, specially the most simple/boring shit like writing unit testing and stuff like that.
 
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AI isn't inherently bad.

The problem is right now it's future is entirely controlled by people who do not give a fuck about anything other than shareholder profits and personal wealth.
 
turntables GIF

I told you AI was good. Once you get over the possibility of losing work and look at the possibilities you will see that it is a mistake to stifle or slow down AI. I've been preaching this lately and very few things get as much pushback. Yet here I am standing with Gabe and there are PC gamers. Where will you stand? Should cars have been slowed down to keep the horse ranchers in business?

Why do you hate AI? Is it just about your fear for our jobs? Do you believe in Terminator 2? I've never heard a legit reason outside of "they will take my job." I'm not saying that isn't a legit reason....but it isn't a valid reason to slow down technology. You didn't care when other new tech regularly took other people's jobs and this is the same thing. I could give tons of examples but start with the car one. You raise horses. They are making cars for the first time. Should they stop making cars to protect your business? Many game dev tasks could go from hours to instant with AI. This by its very nature would speed up game development and make it cheaper as well, which is exactly what our industry needs. I hope Half Life 3 comes out and is fully an AI created game. You still hate AI? I asked Grok to summarize the flaws in my argument for you:

Conclusion


The argument's primary flaws are its reliance on oversimplified analogies, dismissal of valid concerns as irrational, and failure to engage with the broader ethical and societal implications of AI. While AI has transformative potential, the argument's all-or-nothing stance and lack of evidence weaken its persuasiveness. A more balanced approach would acknowledge both AI's benefits and the need for responsible development to address legitimate concerns like job displacement, ethics, and societal impact.
 
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AI is great and safes me a lot of time, but i wouldn't replace art with it. You can see that music, art etc generated by AI is completely souless because it was stolen from someone else.

It's also extremely dumb sometimes and it uses massive ammounts of data and energy, which is not sustainable. Companies replacing jobs with AI is very serious when it actually should be used to make jobs much easier
 
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Where's the praise?

"There are a lot of people who are incredibly successful simply because they were the first person in finance at their company to learn how to use Lotus 1-2-3," says Newell. "Everybody else was still doing accounting in traditional ways, and you could look like a super genius just because you know how to use a desktop computer and a spreadsheet, right?
Click to expand...

He's right. LLMs will speed up work in many fields.
 
Perfectly reasonable and even very mild take. Anyone working in development, game or otherwise, has a high imperative to learn how to integrate AI into their development workflow or fall orders of magnitude behind peers overnight. And it is also crucial to start investigating how it might be brought into the systems or games themselves in some capacity.
 
Loomy said:
AI isn't inherently bad.

The problem is right now it's future is entirely controlled by people who do not give a fuck about anything other than shareholder profits and personal wealth.
Click to expand...
This. Technology is neither good nor bad. It's who uses it and what they use it for.
 
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Draugoth said:
It's also extremely dumb sometimes and it uses massive ammounts of data and energy, which is not sustainable. Companies replacing jobs with AI os very serious when it actually should be used to make jobs much easier
Click to expand...

By 2050 we'll all be in our human battery pods to power the AI machines, just like The Matrix predicted
 
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AI is fine.
Sure, I can see ai taking away jobs that eliminate the potential for human error, and maybe other low paying or sucky jobs nobody actually wants.
But I also see AI as a tool to more assist and less replace.
I know it's going to replace some jobs but it will also create new ones as well.
 
AI will be great for the gaming industry. Not only will it reduce costs, but it will make it much easier for smaller development teams to develop bigger games. It will allow for a lot more innovation, as we are at the point where there is practically none because AAA are so expensive
 
Zacfoldor said:
turntables GIF

I told you AI was good. Once you get over the possibility to losing work and look at the possibilities you will see that it is a mistake to stifle or slow down AI. I've been preaching this lately and very few things get as much pushback. Yet here I am standing with Gabe and there are PC gamers. Where will you stand?

Should cars have been slowed down to keep the horse ranchers in business?

What do you hate AI? Is it just about your fear for our jobs? Do you believe in Terminator 2? I've never heard a legit reason outside of "they will take my job." I'm not saying that isn't a legit reason....but it isn't a valid reason to slow down technology. You didn't care when other new tech regularly took other people's jobs and this is the same thing. I could give tons of examples but start with the car one. You raise horses. They are making cars for the first time. Should they stop making cars to protect your business? Many game dev tasks could go from hours to instant with AI. This by its very nature would speed up game development and make it cheaper as well, which is exactly what our industry needs. I hope Half Life 3 comes out and is fully an AI created game.
Click to expand...
Perhaps we should put you in charge of explaining to people how great AI is when they lose their job to it to cheer them up.

I can tell you've never been made redundant.
 
Ai is 100% not the bad guy and he is 100% right.

Are there dangers in that? Of course but in the grand scheme of human history, not just the next 50-100 years, it will have massive implications for us as a species.
 
"So if I had to point to a technology transition to get in front of, it's to figure out how to use AI to do anything better. If you wanna be an accountant, learn AI, if you want to be an attorney, learn AI, if you're gonna be a programmer, you know, make sure that you know how to use the tools that are comfortable with those programming concepts. That all seems super obvious."
Click to expand...

Agreed, i am learning programming and it's crazy how helpful AI has been.

I was very young but i remember a before and after from the Google/Internet era, and i think we're going to see some similar jump with AI, with the typical diminishing returns of course, but in certains areas, yea no doubt
 
He's right and the hilarious thing I find is that a lot of companies right now don't want you to use it without tons of rules, cant access chatgpt or any other ai chatbot even though that would have been the best tool I could use for quick answers to questions. They are afraid you are going to put a part number or information where it will then train off of it.
 
Yeah, he's right. Last thing you want to do now is stick your head in the sand like an ostrich and wait until the AI "fad" blows over and everyone goes back to doing things like twenty years ago. Spoiler: it's not going to happen, and if that's the path you take, you'll be left in the dust, sorry to say.
 
owandeseis said:
Agreed, i am learning programming and it's crazy how helpful AI has been.

I was very young but i remember a before and after from the Google/Internet era, and i think we're going to see some similar jump with AI, with the typical diminishing returns of course, but in certains areas, yea no doubt
Click to expand...

I've been programming for 20+ years and I'm finding AI incredibly useful. Rather than having to google for a solution to a problem for an hour or so, I just fire up Copilot and ask. Yesterday, I needed to put a powershell script into my integration software which is written in .Net. I just copied and paste the whole script into Copilot and it converted it for me. The cool thing is you can give conversational commands and it will figure it out. For example, I can say "create a sql table from this json structure" and then see the output and then say "add an primary key field to the table and have it increment by one". And then "now create a sql command to copy the json file into the table". That's just a huge time saver when it comes to programmatic stuff that I don't do on a regular basis, especially when google often doesn't always come back with results that are usable for my scenario.

So yeah.....safe to say I'm a fan of AI.......as it is right now. We start seeing sci-fi movies coming to life then that's another thing.
 
Draugoth said:
AI is great and safes me a lot of time, but i wouldn't replace art with it. You can see that music, art etc generated by AI is completely souless because it was stolen from someone else.

It's also extremely dumb sometimes and it uses massive ammounts of data and energy, which is not sustainable. Companies replacing jobs with AI is very serious when it actually should be used to make jobs much easier
Click to expand...
Even with art it doesnt have to be a net negative. Like an open world is gonna need tons of rocks. Is an AI gonna be any worse than a human at doing 3d models of rocks? I dont think so. You can save a lot of time by having an AI make how many rock models you want and then humans will just pick the ones they eant and place them.
 
Loomy said:
The problem is right now it's future is entirely controlled by people who do not give a fuck about anything other than shareholder profits and personal wealth.
Click to expand...
It's so for the last hundred or so years.
What exactly for-profit companies should care for? world peace? there are other guys for this.
 
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