Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has recently touted how great the company’s recently introduced technology called Muse is. While this model is a big advancement, it’s nowhere near as good as the company makes it seem.
While speaking on the Dwarkesh Podcast, Nadella claimed that Microsoft would eventually use this technology to make games. Something like a prompt system equivalent to ChatGPT or Dolly. “It’s just very cool… one thing that we wanted to go after was, using gameplay data, can you actually generate games that are both consistent and then have the ability to generate the diversity of what that game represents,” Nadella said on the podcast.
The Muse page announcing the technology shows what the model is capable of doing. Microsoft likely took the best outputs from Muse to show off, and it’s not much. The output is 180p (that is not a typo), it is choppy, it stutters, and it looks like it has a blurred filter on. It’s nowhere near close enough to make a game that players would want to see, let alone play.
Then there is the gameplay itself, which works more like Minecraft AI than ChatGPT. The game seems to randomly add things into the game, even in a moment, just because the AI thinks that’s what belongs. It doesn’t feel like the AI is adapting to what should be there; it feels like it is guessing what the gameplay should have.
Muse AI is nowhere near the point where it can make games. The closest that Microsoft is likely going to get within a few years is the ability to remaster a game. That is only if the company can somehow get Muse to understand every element of a given game, which seems improbable with current technology.
From what we’ve been shown, it feels like the CEO is just saying what he needs to for stockholders to believe in Xbox’s work on Muse. It feels more like a gimmick that isn’t usable in any real sense than a tool that will help gaming move forward—let alone make games.
Companies don’t expect AI use to be an issue at all, and maybe it won’t be in a smaller sense, but it definitely will be in a grander one. Plenty of games likely have AI tools used to help make them. Procedural generation may be way further than we expect and arguably could be considered AI, but that is a strict tool.
If it were possible to generate an entire game using AI, and it clearly is not, it likely would do a lot of damage to the publisher. There has yet to be a change in the idea that AI replacing creativity is bad, so it would come with a lot of backlash and boycotting. It’s hard enough to generate a profit on a game with a lot of good publicity, let alone one that would be attacked from every direction because AI made it.
Nadella really tried to sell Muse AI in the podcast, saying that seeing it in action was like “a massive, massive moment of, ‘wow.’ It’s kind of like the first time we saw ChatGPT complete sentences or Dolly draw or Sora, this is kind of one such moment.” So, it shows he wants the technology to get somewhere close.
Even still, his idea of Microsoft’s studios making “a catalog of games soon that we will start using these models, or we’re going to train these models to generate, and then start playing them,” is not feasible for what Musa AI is. If anything, it feels like it’s only been half-baked and was shown to the public too soon. 180p should not feel good enough to show off when most AI video demonstrations have much better quality than that.
Source: Dwarkesh Podcast
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