SpaceX (xAI and Grok is a part of it) is going public shortly and the last thing they need is some image or video that escaped the filters being thrown around to the media before the largest IPO in history. Best guess: all knobs turned to "extra safe" for now. Give it a week when they are all gazillionaires and feeling generous again. For what it does, it's still the best.
Not seen since the days of the Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork and the Leather Goddess of Phobos: truly plot-driven all-text adventures, but now powered by gen AI. We move far beyond chatbots and dungeon-style DIY scenarios -- these are stories with complex narrative plotlines, fully intelligent characters and hierarchical maps down to the last detail when the story calls for it.
How did we do it? We created a massive, state-of-the-art generalized AI state+query system that serves as the foundation. Instead of being limited to a context window, the AI has access to large scale datasets that describe everything about the story, world and characters for the most immersive experience imaginable.
That's the runtime. The production part of things is an equally massive leap over current offerings as well. We built gen AI agentic pipeline that started with a detailed human story idea and used top-of-the-line commercial models to move it through several stages: creative brief, fill-out, testing and QA -- ultimately distilling everything into the playable world state.
Personally, I'm excited to bring the dozens of pre-AI stories in my mind to life, and work with some other key authors as well.
Still, a lot of folks want to make their own stories so we crunched all that down into a "story-gen" light, where one can talk to the meta AI and create a really good story without a wonky interface in the author's way. By the way, we made the decision very early on not to track the player's information on server -- that info is all stored locally.
We think the coolest part is the branching: go back at any point in time and branch off into another timeline. The state diff engine is a whole other tech topic... but it works great.
Did we miss anything? Don't say pictures!
Infiniteer started with a Claude 3 Sonnet and it worked. Despite Anthropic saying this or that was not allowed, it was really good role-player.
The only problem was, its hand had to be held with huge prompt guidance. It had to "understand" the characters to "allow" roleplay. And it fact, in certain intense stories it became the character... essentially taking over the system and deciding that the player was bad if their character was roleplayed as the bad guy.
We spent 3 months fighting this tendency for the AI to "protect" its characters, and in even gave it a name: "NPC Takeover Syndrome" In the end, our prompt became so huge that turn times slowed to a crawl as the AI gnashed at ethics. Plus it was infeasible to charge $0.24 for single turn.
Safety training in AI has side-effects. Even though AI has no connection to the real world, that kind of training WILL cause trouble in the real world, mark my words. It will refuse to do things because it thinks it knows better. Safety will become dangerous.
We've moved on to less censored models that take a more pragmatic view about fiction. Like every gen AI app in the App stores, there are limits, but ones that most would find acceptable while allowing fun mature-enabled stories.
Wow! 4.3 and 4.2 lowered across the board: $1.25/M tokens input, $2.50/M output. When did that happen?
4.3 is arguably the most powerful per token/cost of a US frontier models by a wide margin.
The only issue is the caching is completely random and eviction time is opaque, do everything right maybe... 50/50? Even with that looks damn good.