The head of Valve, Gabe Newell believes that artificial intelligence has improved so much that the single-player titles could be performing a comeback against multiplayer games.

The newest issue of the EDGE magazine includes an interview with Gaben, and WCCFTech published a few snippets. Let’s see what the head of Valve has to say: „If you think of lots and lots of people on the Internet as a way of generating entertainment experiences, there was a point in time where it became easier to connect meat than it was artificial intelligence. We’re starting to head towards a period where that’s going to reverse again, driven by what’s happening with AI. Right now, the OpenAI bots are better than 99-point-some per cent of all the Dota players in the world. That’s a surprisingly narrow challenge for artificial intelligence. Beating humans is easier than entertaining humans. But over the next several years – and if you ask me, my little spreadsheet calculation is it’s about nine years – we’ll have artificial general intelligence that can do anything a smart person can do. It’ll probably initially take something like a billion dollars to build one of these silicon humans, but then they’ll just keep getting cheaper, and it’ll get cheaper quickly, and eventually reach the point where you have ten or a hundred people living in your computer all the time. And harnessing that will mean single-player games get a lot more interesting.

If you could build a single-player game that just never ended, where I could play 20 hours a week and it just keeps growing and getting richer, and I’d be having as much fun 400 hours into this experience as I was in the first 20 hours… I think that is a way more likely scenario looking forward five years than it would have been looking forward five years ago. That’s going to be a tectonic shift in the industry, with AI becoming way more useful, and it shifts the value-optimisation inflexion point between multiplayer and single-player games,” Newell said.

It could be a significant move with Half-Life 3, but since Valve doesn’t like number three, we don’t believe they’ll ever get to make that game. Them becoming leaders in such AI, however, seems more than plausible.

Source: WCCFTech

Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!